


A Queen For The Kingdom

by ShanaStoryteller



Category: Den lille Havfrue | The Little Mermaid - Hans Christian Andersen
Genre: F/M, Gen, Mermaids, Original Retelling, Pirates, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2020-09-07 20:57:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 49,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20315914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShanaStoryteller/pseuds/ShanaStoryteller
Summary: The little mermaid grows up.Taking the sea witch's place and becoming a queen on her own terms isn't how she'd planned on doing it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Italiano available: [A Queen for the Kingdom - Una regina per il Regno](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25400308) by [DanceLikeAnHippogriff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DanceLikeAnHippogriff/pseuds/DanceLikeAnHippogriff)

They’re not supposed to save anyone. If they do, if they absolutely must, it can only be a woman. Her grandmother forbade them to save any man from the ocean’s waves. 

But the queen is crying, and the prince is beautiful, she likes the softness in his brown eyes even as the water fills his lungs. He’s trying to swim towards them, reaching out for his mother, but he keeps getting pulled back under the sea.

“Please!” she sobs, grasping onto Tuyet’s shoulders, “please, go - go to him. You’re supposed to help! The books – the books say you help!”

She wonders what books they were. Mermaids don’t usually help. They’re not _supposed _to help.

Her grandmother is going to be so upset with her.

Tuyet looks into the queen’s eyes, hesitating only a moment, then says, “You’ll die.” She’s not strong enough or fast enough to save them both. The queen will already be submerged by the time she’s able to go back for her, and then she won’t be able to dive below to find her without dragging her son underwater as well. 

“GO!” she screams, nails digging into her but unable to break Tuyet’s skin. 

“I can do it quicker,” Tuyet says, because this is something she is allowed to offer the drowning. 

Mercy killings. 

Drowning looks painful. When she was a girl, she used to cover her gills and hold her breath, trying to see what it felt like to have her lungs burn and her darkness creep into the edge of her vision. Snapping the humans’ necks just seems kinder than watching them flail, slow, and stop, kinder than watching the life leak out of them. 

“My son,” the queen insists. 

Tuyet only sighs before kissing the queen’s cheek, then lets her go. She falls beneath waves, and Tuyet watches her head bob up from the surface, but doesn’t waste time watching it fall beneath the waves again. 

She has a human prince to save. 

He’s already fallen deep when she reaches him, his lungs have already filled with water, and she’s run out of time. 

“Not yet,” she says, grabbing onto his upper arm and pulling him close, slotting her mouth over his. It’s simple to suck the water from his lugs, to swallow it down, and to breath air back into his lungs. She covers his mouth and nostrils when she leans away to take another breath so she doesn’t have to do it all over again, then presses her mouth to his so she can give him another lungful of the air his kind seems to need so deeply. She slings his arm over her shoulders and carries him to the surface, breaking up through the water so there’s plenty of air for him to breathe. 

The ship is in pieces, and dozens of bodies float at the surface of the ocean. She wonders where the queen is, if she’s already dead, if maybe she could leave the prince on a piece of the broken ship and go searching for his mother. 

But the waves are rough, and it would be such a waste, if after all that he ended up dying anyway. 

Then again, letting him die here, now, means she won’t have gone against her grandmother, won’t have to face her father and tell him she’s broken one of the few rules that’s ever been given her. 

The prince’s head rolls against her shoulder, and his dark eyelashes cling to dark skin of his cheeks. His lips are bitten through, and she raises a hand to touch that chapped skin, feeling the rough texture of his lips under the pad of her thumb. 

His eyes crack open, and she pulls her hand back, face hot. She feels like when she was a little kid and her grandmother caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to. “Ma,” he starts, then coughs, pressing his face into her neck, like a child. 

Something tender but not maternal unfurls in her heart, and she’s hit with a sharp stab of gratitude for the queen, for choosing her son over herself, for giving Tuyet this moment, this feeling of softness. 

Given the choice, would her own mother have chosen to die for her? Did she regret it, as they laid Tuyet on her chest and her life slipped away from her - was that her mother’s last thought, cursing the daughter she’d died to have, or was she happy to do it? Sad to go, but glad to see her child arrive? 

The prince has passed out again, his breath hot against her collarbone, and she holds him to her that much more tightly, vowing to bring him home. His mother died to save her, just as her own mother died to birth her, and Tuyet can’t let that death be in vain.

It’s harder to swim like this, holding a human in her arms and unable to dip below the choppy waves to where it’s calmer, but she makes it to land just as the sun is starting to peak over the horizon, just as the murky grey of dawn is streaked through with vibrant bits of orange. 

She drags him to shore, gritting her teeth against the dry sand dragging against her scales. She has to bring him high enough that the tide won’t drag him back, and it seems like clumsily maneuvering on land takes as long as the whole swim there had, and the sun hangs high in the sky, bright and orange and so, so hot. She feels half cooked, and licks her lips, but finds only salt crystals left behind on peeling skin. 

She hears something, and her head snaps up, straining. 

“Prince Elias!” she hears people shouting, “Prince Elias, where are you?” 

“Elias,” she repeats, looking down at the man she’s saved. She leans close, presses her peeling, salt covered lips to the skin of his cheek, and then rolls back towards the sea, letting a wave wash over her and pull her deeper into the sea. 

She stays huddled in the cove until the voices get closer, until humans are running across the beach and towards her prince, and she knows she should leave then, but doesn’t, instead waiting and watching them drag Prince Elias of Tizile away from the shore, until he’s a speck in the distance, and then until she can see nothing of him at all. 

Tuyet knows then, that if anyone asks her about this, asks her what she’s done and where she’s been, she’ll do something she’s never done before.

She’ll lie.

~

“My voice?” Tuyet raises a hand to her throat. She’d thought the sea witch would demand her family’s conch shell, would want to use it to control all the creatures of the sea, and she was prepared to refuse, to deny her and lose her chance to walk on land if her family’s safety and power was the price. This cave now seems colder, and smaller. “But I need it. I won’t - the prince didn’t see me, if we can’t speak he won’t know who I am!”

Caligula circles her, and Tuyet can’t help the spike of jealousy. The sea witch walks on two feet, moving in the water as if she’s on land, her pale skin and pale hair glowing in the faint light of the bioluminescent coral. Her narrowed blue eyes are the same color as the sky above the sea, and the sea nets clinging to her body is black and crusted, but the gnarled trident in her hand stands tall at her side, although it looks like it’s less than it once was. Her father has a trident, but his is glittering and silver, seeming to emit a faint light all its own. This one is covered in a thick layer or rust and grime.

“Well, if you’re so attached to your tongue,” she says, and the rasp of her voice sends a shiver down Tuyet’s spine. “Then there is _one _other thing of value you have to barter.” 

“I have pearls!” she says, holding out the nondescript burlap sack she’d carried to this corner of the ocean. She opens it to reveal a fortune in black and pink pearls. 

Caligula’s face twists and she smacks it out of Tuyet’s hands. The bag falls to the cave floor, and the priceless pearls go rolling across the ground. Tuget gasps and reaches out to gather them back up, but Caligula grabs her wrist tight enough to break it and jerks her upright, pulling her so close that Tuyet could count her jagged teeth one by one. “What use have I for pearls, girl?” she sneers. “I don’t care for the proceeds of you pilfering the royal stores.” Tuyet flushes. Caligula raises her wrist to her mouth, and Tuyet flinches as the sea witch’s teeth pierce her skin, just enough so a thin ribbon of her blood rises out of her skin. Caligula breathes it in, something close to euphoria crossing her face. 

“You - you want my blood?” Tuyet asks, trying to hide her trembling as she leans away from Caligula as much as she can without drawing more attention to herself. 

Her face twists and she shoves Tuyet to ground, and her tail twists and drags painfully against cave floor, the rough material catching and pulling at her scales. She wants to start gathering the pearls back up, but doesn’t dare move with the sea witch towering over her. “Stupid girl! You are the daughter of the king of the sea. Magic is in your blood, being formed in your cold little heart.” She waves her trident through what’s left of the cloud of Tuyet’s blood, and wherever it touches, rust flakes off. “I grow old, and weak.” She doesn’t _feel_ weak, and she certainly doesn’t look it. “Grow the magic in your heart and restore my trident to what it once was. Once you've given me enough magic, once I’m strong again, I’ll give you the legs you so desire.” 

“How - how long will that take?” she whispers. The thought of spending a minute more in the sea witch’s presence terrifies her. Maybe she shouldn’t have come here, maybe this was all a mistake.

If it was, it doesn’t matter. She’s already here, already committed.

Caligula looks down at her, and in between one breath and the next she changes, reigning herself in until she’s not so scary, until she just looks like an old woman in draped netting, until her long white hair settles around her shoulders and no longer looks like a jellyfish atop her head. She holds out a hand for Tuyet to take, and she only hesitates a moment before putting her hand in the sea witch’s, only just managing to stop herself from jerking away from the iciness of her skin. “Well, my dear, that entirely depends on you, and how hard you work.”

~

Tuyet knows that she’s lucky, that she has what others don’t. Her life isn’t perfect, of course, her mother is dead and she’s the youngest of six, she has five older sisters who must love her, but also tease her and mock her and do all sorts of things without her. She has a grandmother who’s cared for her and her sisters her whole life, who tells Tuyet of the surface for those long years before she turned sixteen and could go see it for herself. She also twisted her ears and scolded her for letting her garden fall into disarray, and would yank loose scales from her tail hard enough that she’d bleed, but, well, nothing and no one is perfect.

Her sisters had each only gone once. They’d broken the surface of the water on their birthdays and then never again, each seemingly satisfied with their glimpse of the human world.

Tuyet’s never been satisfied by anything. Maybe that’s her problem.

She can’t be satisfied with being a mermaid, with living centuries longer than any human ever will, with being royal and loved and privileged, with being the daughter of the king of sea.

No, she’s a creature of want, and that wanting has led her here, to doing the bidding of the sea witch.

She knows she has magic, of course, it’s what gives her her long life, it’s what allows her to swim to the deepest depths of the ocean, where the pressure and cold would kill any merperson not of royal blood.

But Tuyet is sixteen and impulsive and so full of want she lets it lead her into situations like these, searching for the impossible even when there’s no part of the sea which is forbidden to her.

Well, there’s one part, but she’s already broken that rule, and is sitting in the very caves her father and grandmother always warned her to avoid.

“I don’t know how to use it,” she tells Caligula, eyeing the sharp nails on her hands, nails that look more like claws, and hoping that the witch keeps them far away from her. “It just happens.”

“I know,” Caligula murmurs, lips pulled back in what might be a sneer or a smile. “It’s as easy as breathing for you, isn’t it, Princess?”

It’s easier. She can hold her breath, but she doesn’t know how to put a stop to the flow of power under her skin. 

She doesn’t say anything, and Caligula snorts, turning away as she says, “No matter. It’s no use to me like this, complacent and easy. You’re going to need to train until it’s strong enough to restore my trident.” 

Tuyet glances at the rusty trident in the corner. The small spot that her blood had cleared shines so brightly it looks like a diamond sitting on the surface of it. 

She could run, couldn’t she? Her father and grandmother will be furious, and she’ll be in trouble, but surely less trouble than she’s in now, less trouble than being tied to the sea witch puts her in? But they’ll lock her up, ground her for years at this rate, maybe even decades. 

Her human will be an old man by the time she’ll be allowed to break the surface to see him again, and she can’t - she doesn’t want that. She has to see him again. If she wants to see her prince again, then she has to stay. 

Caligula turns and there’s something red and glowing in her hands, and Tuyet doesn’t realize it’s hot until it’s pressing against the skin of her arm. She cries out and tries to swim away, but Caligula grabs onto her hair and holds her in place. “The faster you learn to harness your power, the faster it stops,” she coldly. 

Thirteen hours and a body of blistering, bleeding burns later, Tuyet is exhausted and her skin is covered in oozing wounds. She’d thought she might find relief when Caligula ran out of skin, but she only heals a section of it and starts it anew. 

“What do you want?” she sobs, helplessly trying to twist her body away from the brand. 

Caligula presses it into the skin of Tuyet’s collarbone, uncaring of the way it rips a scream from her throat. “You don’t like it? Then stop me. You are a daughter of Proteus who was born of Pallas. The power of the sea is in your blood, and you cannot even steal the heat from my hand?” She hits it against her cheek as if slapping her, and Tuyet’s vision nearly goes white with pain, with the horrifying sensation of feeling the skin of her face being scraped and burned off in a single blow. 

“Stop it!” she screams, except this time she doesn’t pull away, but instead pushes forward. She reaches for the hot iron; even if it burns her hands it’s better than letting it tear her apart. 

At first she thinks she’s moved wrong and broken her spine. Her back cracks so hard that it leaves her breathless, like she’s spent hours hunched over and now all her vertebrae are moving into a different shape. Then the iron is in her hand instead of Caligula’s, as cold as the ocean floor where she’s touching it, but red hot where’s its buried in Caligula’s thigh. 

Caligula doesn’t look ugly anymore, doesn’t look mean or angry, and she doesn’t reach out to grab or hurt her. Instead, she grabs the iron and pulls it from her body, equally as uncaring of the cloud of her blood swirling around her as she’d been at Tuyet’s pain. 

“Sorry!” Tuyet cries, dropping the iron into the sand, eyes wide. “Sorry, I’m so sorry-”

“Good girl,” Caligula murmurs, dragging an ice cold finger against Tuyet’s cheek that she’d torn apart, and Tuyet feels the soothing wave of healing magic cover her body. By the time it ebbs away, her body is as flawless and pain free as when she entered the cave.

Tuyet reaches for the wound she left at Caligula’s thigh, towards the blackened and crust skin surrounding the sluggishly bleeding gash. “Sorry.” Caligula has healed her wounds, but Tuyet can’t heal hers.

“It’s alright,” she says, running her hand through Tuyet’s hair just like her grandmother does. Did.

There will be no more of Grandmother’s lectures, her affection, her stories or her shame. Tuyet’s thrown that away for a chance at the surface, for a chance with her prince.

Caligula’s momentary softness sharpens as she grabs onto Tuyet’s hair and pulls her closer, greed glinting eagerly in her pale blue eyes. “That was good, so good. Much better than I was expecting. Keep it up and you’ll have your legs and human in no time.”

Tuyet’s eyes flicker down to the sea witch’s pale, human legs and swallows down her protests and her fear.

The sooner she fixes Caligula’s trident, the sooner she gets to leave.

~

Most people are not bold enough to go searching for the sea witch, they do not swimming into her lair. Most can’t. It’s close enough to the ocean floor that they can’t stand the pressure, and the journey would kill them rather than the destination.

Instead, they summon her.

Salt water and salted blood and salty tears swirled together in a conch shell and poured into the waves. Caligula can resist the summons if she wants to, and Tuyet doesn’t think that’s something she should be able to do, but Caligula’s power isn’t all talk. She may not have the innate magic of a royal mermaid, but she can do things that Tuyet would never even dream of, couldn’t do even if her life depended on it.

That’s why she’s here, after all.

“I like it when they summon me,” Caligula confides right before she leaves, tapping her on the nose, in an oddly cheerful mood. She must be getting summoned by someone important. “It gives me the advantage.”

Tuyet wonders if that means she had an advantage when she swam into Caligula’s cave. It certainly didn’t feel like it.

Those moments are her blessings now, when Caligula’s been summoned away. Sometimes she’s only gone for a few hours. Other times, it’s days. Tuyet’s supposed to stay in the cave, supposed to practice the spells and exercises Caligula has given her to expand her power.

And she does.

Sometimes.

Most of the time, even. She does understand how important this is, understands that the sooner she can fix Caligula’s trident, the sooner she gets her legs. 

But sometimes she needs a reminder about what she wants her legs _for_. 

And Prince Elias makes patrols every third morning. 

It’s a delicate balance, getting close enough to see while still being far enough away not to get caught. His ship is small and sleek, for a ship, cutting through the water as his flag flaps in the wind. He always stands at the helm, even though it’s dangerous, what with how desperate everyone is to kill him. She’s overheard his advisors yelling at him about being reckless, about endangering they’re tiny nation. The courtyard of her castle is bigger than her prince’s whole island, but it’s not as if she’s interested in him for that. She wouldn’t care if he were just a poor fisherman. She’d prefer it, even, because then she wouldn’t need legs to get to him, she could tip his tiny boat over and cut through his nets and take him for her very own. 

But she can’t do that. Even if she could grab him, he doesn’t know her, and even if he did, he can’t leave. He’s too good of a man to leave his country now. 

They are at war, after all. 

Tuyet doesn’t pay too much attention to what the humans do up above, but from her spying on Elias she can’t help but notice. All the pirates of the sea seem to have converged here, on this little island nation, and seem determined to claim if for their own. 

It’s strange, if nothing else, like finding a swarm of sharks clustered together like tuna, when that’s not what sharks _do_. They’re not social creatures. 

Well, one shark is, but she can’t imagine that he’s very pleased with her right now. Her father had sent the goblin sharks after her more than once when she’d been late coming home, but so far they haven’t managed to find her. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if they do find her. 

They can’t hurt her. She may not have the conch shell her family uses to control all the creatures in the sea, but she’s still of royal blood. When she speaks, they must obey. Her sisters haven’t figured out that trick yet. They always got caught sneaking out, when she almost never does. 

Maybe it would be better if she had. She wouldn’t be indebted to Caligula then, wouldn’t be trading the power of her blood for legs, would instead be safe in the depths of the ocean in a castle as big as her prince’s whole island. His ship isn’t even the size of the pupil of her eye when she skims the ocean floor. It’s easier to withstand the pressure of the ocean when she’s as big as the emptiness around her, and so the deeper she goes, the larger she becomes.

The humans made a statue of her grandfather once, somehow, and plated it in gold and called him Collases. None of them can manage to increase their size above the surface of the water. They’re too big and too heavy. Without the buoyancy of the water, their body collapses into the ground. He must have taken them down below, rescued a sailor or kidnapped a human wife who he returned to the surface. 

She clutches the rock she’s hiding behind, resting her head against the rough edge and focuses on the dark, handsome figure standing at the edge of the boat. 

Prince Elias isn’t someone she can steal or even borrow. 

She’s saves his life, and she’s decided it belongs to her, or that at the very least she deserves a chance to make him her own, but - how could she love a deserter, a traitor, how could she love a man who would leave behind his kingdom? 

It’s different for her. She’s the youngest daughter of six, her father has her five eager sisters to choose from for the next queen. But her prince’s island has no one else. 

Not even a king and queen, anymore. 

Prince Elias is all alone, with an island’s hope resting on his shoulders, and even if she dragged him down with her, if she stole herself a human husband - she would not love him if he stayed, if he chose her over his kingdom then she wouldn’t want him anymore. 

It’s impossible for him to go to her, even if he wanted to, even if he knew she existed. 

So she’ll have to go to him. 

Her secret trips to see her prince are constructive. In a way, they do benefit the sea witch in the end. 

They renew her convictions, remind her what she wants, and fills her with determination to finish this, to restore Caligula’s trident so that she may receive her legs and step onto the soft sand and walk to her prince. 

~

A couple moon cycles later, she’s not sure if it’s worth it anymore.

“Again,” Caligula commands. 

Tuyet grits her teeth, knowing by now that Caligula won’t care for her begging or for her pain. She looks down at her hands, and the way she can’t get her fingers to stop twitching and shaking. Her arms below her elbows feel like jelly. It’s a struggle to raise them, never mind use them. 

“If I mess this up, we die,” she points out. Appealing to Caligula’s own self serving tendencies is the only way to get anywhere. 

For example, she’s stopped healing Tuyet perfectly, says it’s a waste of magic. She’s now covered in jagged scars, the pale scar tissue standing out in contrast to the rest of her skin. 

Surely her prince won’t mind a few scars, right? 

A part of her doesn’t even care about the prince anymore, not at this moment. She just wants to leave, wants to run as far from Caligula as she can. Wants legs so that she_ can_ run. 

There’s no place for her left in this ocean. She can’t bring herself go home, and she can’t stay here. She doesn’t even know if she’ll be able to go to her prince. How can she face him, after what Caligula did? After what Tuyet let Caligula do? 

It has been a long, painful couple of months.

All she wants is to go somewhere her father won’t find her, where Caligula won’t find her. She wants crawl onto land and keep going until there’s nothing around her but freshwater rivers, until the salt and blood and pain can’t find her. 

Caligula grabs her jaw, squeezing her thumb and forefinger against and into her gums, and Tuyet hadn’t even noticed the blood in her mouth until the pressure of Caligula’s fingers sends a gush of it down her throat, and she’s coughing, choking on her own blood. 

The sea witch doesn’t let her go, only says, “If you mess this up, _you_ will die. So don’t mess it up. I’ve put too much time into your for it all to be for nothing.” 

Tuyet sighs, looking down at her hands, at the rocky crevices that lie in rubble around her. She takes a deep breath and presses her hands against the side of the stone, feels the roughness against the palms of hands, searching, feeling. 

“What’s taking so long?” Caligula snaps. 

Tuyet ignores her. The sea witch will keep making her explode these rocks until she’s satisfied, until the destruction is sufficiently large enough to convince her that Tuyet’s powers are accelerating at an acceptable rate. 

But she’s exhausted and shaky and so, so tired of Caligula ripping her open just to watch her bleed. 

So she searches, looking for something she can exploit, something that’s already there instead of just blindly pushing her power into the surface. 

It takes another half minute for her to find it, a crack running through the inside of it, too small for even the smallest of fish to swim through, barely even there. But it’s right through the center, which is exactly what she needs. 

“Princess,” Caligula snarls, the claws on her hand digging into the muscle of her shoulder. 

“Afiago!” she snaps, pushing her magic through that crack, and then forcing it outwards. 

It’s only Caligula pulling her away that saves her life, only the sea witch’s powers which get the both of them far away fast enough to keep them from being impaled by the stone’s shrapnel. 

The ground shakes, then collapses. It’s not just that, but Tuyet can see the groaning and shifting across the sea floor, see the effects of her spell sweeping through the ocean like a wave on the shore. 

“Very good,” Caligula murmurs, her hand still on Tuyet’s shoulder, her claws still _in_ Tuyet’s shoulder. 

Tuyet presses a hand to her mouth, uncaring of the way it pulls at her shoulder, suddenly no longer concerned with the pain and numbness throbbing through her body. “No - you have to - please, you have to stop it! People will die!” 

She can already see a tsunami beginning to form in the distance, and effect of what she’s just done. She hadn’t realized - she hadn’t known it would reach the great plates sliding down below the earth, otherwise she wouldn’t have done it. 

“Yes,” Caligula says, and Tuyet flinches away from the pleasure in her voice. “They will.” 

“Please fix it,” Tuyet begs, “I’ll do anything, anything you want, just - please!” 

“You already do anything I want,” Caligula says, amused and detached. “But I’m sorry to say that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.” 

Tuyet blinks. “W-what?” 

“Congratulations, dear,” she murmurs, glee in the brightness of her eyes. “You’ve done what I cannot. Soon, all that delicious magic of yours will be mine.” 

For the first time, it occurs to Tuyet that she’s never asked what Caligula wants all this power for. She’s never done anything truly terrible before, backwater deals and swimming on the edges of society. Something dark and slippery and foul, of course, but not something horrible enough that her father ever felt the need to do anything about it. 

But what if that wasn’t out of a lack of desire, but a lack of power? 

What if restoring her trident just gives Caligula the power she needs to wreak destruction over the whole sea? What if Tuyet is handing her the keys to the palace, to her home?

“Look what you’ve done,” Caligula says, her entire presence cold against Tuyet’s side. “You can never go home now. Look at the mess you’ve made.” 

Tuyet’s tears aren’t as dense as the surrounding water, so they float to the surface, small pockets of fresh water carrying her sorrows to where she so longs to go. Cracks branch out from the ground, spreading farther than she can see. 

The destruction she’s caused - its immense. It’s something more than just powerful. It’s dangerous, and people are going to die, her people are going to die. The people of her ocean that she’s supposed to protect are going to be harmed because of her. Caligula is right. 

She really can never go home now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it! feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	2. Chapter 2

The trident is half gleaming silver at this point, half full of Tuyet’s magic. It lies in the corner of Caligula’s cave, waiting for each bit of magic that she pours into it. The rust flakes off as she pours more magic into it, and at this point it’s always glowing. At first Tuyet found the light comforting, but now it just seems ominous, a reminder of her debt to Caligula, of the life she’s given up forever just for the chance to walk on the sand instead of dragging herself across it.

Tuyet swims around it as she heads to the mouth of the cave, going out her way to avoid it when she can.

“Going somewhere?” Caligula asks idly, suddenly sitting right in the middle of the room when she hadn’t been there before. She doesn’t look up from the scrolls she’s reading.

She does her best not to flinch. “I – I was just going to–”

“Going to look at your prince?” the sea witch finishes. “Very well. Be back before sunset.”

How would she even know when sunset is? They’re deep enough that the sun’s rays don’t reach them, but she knows better than to question it. “Okay.”

She waits, seeing if Caligula has anything else to say to her, if she’s going to try and stop her, and when she still doesn’t even bother to look at her, Tuyet darts out of the cave.

Ever since the earthquake and tsunami she’d accidentally made, Caligula hasn’t been watching her as closely. Or maybe she’s been watching her just as closely the whole time, if she knew about her frequent trips to the prince, but now she isn’t, or she still is, and just doesn’t care if Tuyet knows it.

Now that Tuyet has nowhere left to go, it’s like Caligula’s grasp on her has tightened and loosened at the same time. She decides not to think about it, not to obsess on it when there’s nothing she can do about it. The trident is halfway restored, which means she’s halfway to her freedom, to legs and her prince and his island.

That’s what she’ll focus on. Not her current circumstances, not the sisters and grandmother and father and kingdom that she’s lost, but on the hopeful future.

Except when she breaks the surface to sneak looks at Elias on his weekly patrol, she sees something that shatters that hopeful future.

There’s a new ship heading towards Elias’s, with what basically amounts to an armada surrounding it. The ships are foreign, but they’re not pirate ships, not attacking like so many other ships that approach this island’s shore.

There’s a girl on the helm of the ship. She’s pale and beautiful, wearing a dress the same shade as the clouds in the sky, and bright red hair piled atop her head. On top of her hair is a crown made of glittering gold and jewels.

A princess. A foreign princess, coming to her prince’s land.

Heart thudding in her chest, she inches closer, but it’s still not close enough, so she clings to the side of the ship, fitting her hands into sharp barnacles and ignoring the way they cut into her skin. It’s still not enough, she can hear the sound of people talking but can’t make out the words. “Audite,” she whispers, and the magic in her blood pulls forward, until she can hear the crewman talking as well as if they were standing right next to her. She directs the magic, shifting past conversations about the weather and work and things that don’t interest her until she finds a conversation that does.

“-sure if he should do this.”

“What else is he supposed to do? We need a king, not a prince. Besides, look, this girl comes with a whole navy as her bride price.”

“And you think it comes free? That they just want a marriage and a throne for Princess Felicity in return for all that? Their kingdom will swallow our island whole. Prince Elias will be a king in name only if he does this.”

The other man scoffs, derisive. “We’re not winning this war. He can’t win it, and they can. That’s what matters.”

“And after the war?” he challenges.

There’s a moment of tense silence, then, “If he marries her, at least there’ll be an after. If the pirates win, there’ll be no island to protect when they’re through.”

Tuyet has heard enough, has heard more than enough. She lets go of the ship and dives back under the water, feels herself increasing in size not because of pressure but so her bigger body can get her to her destination faster.

She shrinks back down as she approaches the cave, bursting inside and crying out, “Caligula! Caligula, please, I need legs now!”

“What are you shouting about?” the sea witch asks from right behind her, and Tuyet doesn’t have the energy to panic about her appearing out of nowhere. “There’s no need to be hysterical.”

“I need legs now!” she repeats, too desperate to be afraid.

Caligula raises an eyebrow. “Finish restoring my trident, and I’ll make you the most wonderful pair of legs your prince has ever seen.”

She glances at the trident, but it’s taken her months to get it even halfway. She may be stronger than she’s ever been, may have more control over magic than she’s ever had, but it’s all relative. She can’t finish restoring the trident all at once. “I can’t, and it won’t matter, not if I don’t get legs now. It’ll be too late!”

Caligula isn’t lashing out or hurting her, which is what Tuyet has come to expect. If anything, she almost seems amused, and Tuyet can’t even feel grateful for it. She prefers Caligula’s rage to her condescension. “No trident, no legs. Why the rush?”

“He’s getting married!” she says, nearly bursting with it. “To some – some princess with a ton of ships, and I know he needs them,” she’s selfish, she’s so selfish, wanting the prince for herself, wanting him to choose her when choosing her means turning his back on a guaranteed safety for his country, but she can’t help it, “but I want him, and if I wait, he’ll be married to her and then there will be no chance for me.” She doesn’t need the prince, perhaps, she’s planning to keep her legs even if he doesn’t choose her, doesn’t love her. But she wants the chance, at least. 

“Show me,” she says, and an ember of hope burns in the center of Tuyet’s chest. Maybe Caligula will let her have her chance. She can come back to the sea at night, surely, and work to restore the trident then. She’ll do it, she really will, and Caligula knows the type of magic that will force her to keep her promise. She’ll accept the binding spell gladly if it gets her close to her prince. 

She brings Caligula over to the ships. They must have sent a rowboat or the ilk between the ships while she was gone, because now the red haired Princess Felicity is on Elias’s ship, is standing at the front of the ship, her hands in his and a smile on neither of their faces. 

A captain stands between them, and there are nobles on her prince’s ship. She hadn’t noticed that before, hadn’t thought the princess’s white dress meant anything, but it must, with nobles on his ship and a captain between them, all of them in clothes too beautiful to wear to sea. 

“I’m too late,” she says, and the despair makes her feel heavy, like the only thing left to do is to sink to the bottom of the ocean and stay there, to wait for her skin to turn to coral and for fish to make a home of her ribcage. 

Caligula clucks her tongue. “Well, we can’t have that, can we?” 

Tuyet doesn’t understand. “There’s nothing-”

“Exanimis,” she casts, like it doesn’t matter, like it means nothing. 

“No!” she shouts, but it’s too late. 

The princess’s pretty eyes widen, her lips part, and she falls backwards into the sea. There’s screaming, and the prince doesn’t hesitate, diving in after his would be bride. 

Tuyet tries to go after her, knowing she can get to her so much faster than any human, but Caligula grabs her arm, her nails digging into soft muscle. She doesn’t even notice the pain, pulling against her even as it makes the wounds even worse, even as her blood falls thick and slick into the sea. “Don’t bother. She’s already dead.” 

She closes her eyes against that, because she knows it’s true. Exanimis snatches the air from the victim’s lungs. It’s meant to be used to hunt whales. 

A small human woman stands no chance against it. “Why,” she starts, and finds her throat clogged with suppressed sobs. More men are diving down, trying to find Felicity, but she knows it’s already too late. If they haven’t found her body already, then they never will, it’s already sunken deeper than they can swim. 

“Now your prince is unwed, and you have time to finish restoring my trident,” she pulls her claws from Tuyet’s arm. “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” 

Not like this. Never like this. Why do all her wants turn out like this, twisted and painful and not worth the cost?

Caligula puts her arm around her shoulder squeezing, and maybe Tuyet would be able to find it comforting if she didn’t feel so numb. “Don’t get back too late.”

“Okay,” she answers, out of a lack of anything else to do. She stays and watches as the divers give up, and the prince is the las of them, in fact he doesn’t give up at all. His men have to drag him out of the ocean and onto a boat, have to force him back onto his ship. There’s arguing and screaming, and for a moment Tuyet is afraid that she’s going to witness the beginnings of another war, that the princess’s people will decide to declare war on this island in return for Felicity’s death.

She can’t hear what they’re saying, and she can’t bear to use magic to do so. Somehow the only thing worse than not knowing is knowing.

The argument lasts for hours, and the sun is just starting to set when the armada retreats, sailing back to whatever land they came from, and the prince’s ships head home.

There’ll be no war between them, at least. But that doesn’t help the war Prince Elias is in now, with random attacks from what seems like every pirate at sea.

She’s still sitting there when the moon hangs high in the sky, not knowing where else to go. She has to return to Caligula’s cave, of course she does, but she can’t bring herself to do it.

Not yet.

She dives beneath the waves, going deeper and deeper, following the currents and even swimming past them.

Princess Felicity’s body isn’t quite on the ocean floor, instead her dress is snagged on a rock, and she’s bobbing above it, her red hair floating all around her head and her green eyes wide, her blue lips open in a soundless scream, one she hadn’t quite managed to give when all the air has been stolen from her lungs.

“I’m sorry,” Tuyet whispers. “I didn’t mean – I never wanted anything to happen to you. I wouldn’t have said anything if I’d known. If – if you’d had air in your lungs still, I could have replaced it with water, and I could have saved you from this, if nothing else. I _would _have saved you. No matter the cost. I swear it.” 

The princess, of course, doesn’t answer. Whether Tuyet is telling the truth doesn’t matter. Whether Felicity would have believed her doesn’t matter. None of it makes her any less dead.

Tuyet delicately closes the princess’s eyes, and hesitates, not sure where to go from here. She’s found her. Now what is she going to do with her? If she leaves her here, something will eat her, or she’ll just decompose in a way that Tuyet can’t call dignified. Human bodies don’t turn to coral or caves or anything like that. They just rot away. And maybe that does some good on the earth, in the soil, but here it’s just food. She could bring her body to shore, and hope someone finds her before she’s made into food, or before she rots past the point of dignity, but it’s a gamble if that would work. And what will they do with her anyway, the decomposing body of a foreign princess?

Tuyet drags her teeth against her bottom lip, then swims close enough to reach out and cup Felicity’s face in her hands, dragging her thumbs against her cold cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she says again, like her regret does this woman any good. “I’m so sorry. I hope you have peace in your death, and happiness wherever your soul is,” she says, the words sitting strangely in her mouth.

Her people don’t have death rites, only mourning songs, and the only one designed to be sung by one is the Widow’s Wail, and singing that would be more insult than tribute. She struggles to think of anything else to say, of any more words that humans say over their dead, but comes up empty.

She sighs, presses her forehead to the dead princess’s, and brings the magic of her blood to the fore before whispering, “Calamochnus.”

Felicity’s body dissolves between her hands, breaking apart and floating to the surface of the ocean. She’s transformed her body into seafoam, and she watches until the last of her has been swept away by the current.

The white dress finally rips free of the rock and floats away, but the crown that had been resting around Felicity’s head now lays half buried in the sand. Tuyet can leave it here, can let it remain buried treasure, or can leave it on her prince’s shore, or maybe even try and catch up with the princess’s armada so they can bring at least this small piece of her home.

Instead she picks it up and lets magic flow through her fingers. The crown loses none of it’s shine, none of its precious stones, but it becomes smaller and more flexible at the same time.

Tuyet fastens the crown around her neck like a necklace, flush against her skin and impossible to ignore, to forget.

She won’t let this happen again.

First the tsunami which must have hurt her people, then this princess, and her death has hurt not only the girl herself, but her prince and his island. She won’t allow herself to be used like this again. No matter the cost. And if that means fastening a noose around her neck to keep her honest –

So be it.

~

Caligula doesn’t say anything about the crown she wears like a choker around her neck, but Tuyet hadn’t expected her too. Precious metals and stones don’t interest her, nor pearls nor anything physical that supposedly has value.

The sea witch cares for the currency of power, and power alone.

Things settle, and she almost wonders if she was over reacting, if perhaps Caligula is not quite the monster her memory twists her into.

She’s wrong, of course, and it’s her fault for forgetting.

A pirate ship passes by her prince’s island, and doesn’t start a fight, doesn’t seem to do more than curve around the edge before heading off into the horizon.

It’s strange only because it’s normal, and things have been so abnormal recently. A successful pirate crew and its captain have no reason to cause trouble by attacking an island kingdom, one who may be prosperous for its size but has no great stores of gold and riches. Especially one that has a history of turning a blind eye to pirate ships on its docks, as long as they didn’t cause any trouble.

They’ve caused nothing but trouble for months, and Tuyet doesn’t understand it. Maybe if she were human she would, if she could walk through the market and hear everyone gossiping and laughing she would be able to figure it out, would know why pirates now seem to go out of their way to attack an island that used to be their port in a storm.

Except for this one, apparently, who sails on by like it never even occurs to them to start a fight.

Of course Tuyet follows them.

She’s _curious_.

She sees the crew on deck, and a man in a brightly colored coat and a hat with a feather in it is standing near the wheel of the ship. But he doesn’t seem to be doing much, is relaxed and laughing and chatting with his crew, which is nothing like any pirate captain she’s ever seen before.

Night comes and the ship quiets, which is when she creeps over, once more pulling herself up the sides of the boat until she can peek over the edge. The captain sits at the edge of the ship, everyone but the most necessary of crew asleep in their hammocks.

And these three. The captain is with two crewman, which upon a closer look are clearly two crew woman. They both look rougher around the edges than the captain, clothes more tough and practical than pretty. One has fire red hair like Felicity did, and the other has skin even darker than her prince’s, and they sit on either side of the captain. He’s laughing and smiling, and they’re not, but they don’t look unhappy to be around him either.

They seem familiar to her, like she’s seen them before, but of course that can’t be right. Can it? She so rarely risks getting close enough to get a good look at humans, surely she’d remember.

“Audite,” she casts, because she doesn’t just want to see or hear, she wants to do both.

“-all the way to Creta, you’re sure? That’s so far.”

“Got someplace to be?” the dark woman asks, nudging him in the ribs.

He rolls his eyes. “I just don’t think the bounty is worth the risks, Maria.”

The redhead’s expression doesn’t change. “I do.”

“Yes darling, I know that,” he says wryly, shaking his head. “You both do remember that I’m the captain here, right?”

“Yes darling,” the women both echo, real humor finally shining through their emotionless mask.

“I overheard one the of the men joking that at least you wouldn’t say the wrong name in bed,” Maria says, pushing her fingers through the captain’s hair.

“Maria and Ana are not the same name,” he says, leaning into her touch, “and I told the crew that calling you both Ana Maria was suicidal, so that was rather bold of them. Are they still alive? You’re not usually so generous with people who speak ill of you.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not usually so generous with people who speak ill of _you_.”

There’s laughter and more soft conversation, but Tuyet isn’t paying attention to them anymore. If those two women are Ana Darling and Maria Freeman, then that must mean –

\- the man is Captain John Darling.

Tuyet _has _seen them before.

She’s heard of them, of course, heard of John running off with another man’s wife, heard how John may be the captain but Ana is the one to watch out for, is the one that left no prisoners and gave no mercy.

Which is how John had gotten the fearsome Maria Freeman on his crew. Tuyet and her sisters had even seen that battle, had watched John’s crew fight Maria’s, had seen Ana hold a sword underneath Maria’s chin, and had seen her surrender. John’s ship had been badly damaged, so they’d sunk it on purpose and then taken over Maria’s ship, and she and her sisters had watched, and waited, but neither Maria’s body nor that of her crew had sunken into the ocean’s depths.

Rumors had run rampant after that, so much so that they’d heard them, even down in the ocean’s deep. Or maybe it was just her, because she’s always been so eager and interested in the lives of the humans, and this story was as fascinating to her as anything else.

If John and Ana Darling had been like out of a fairytale before, if Maria Freeman had seemed fearsome and powerful when she was on her own, it was nothing like after they were together. It seemed like they’d mastered the sea, as if there wasn’t a bit of it they couldn’t corral into their favor.

But she’d heard another rumor too.

She’d heard when they were captured, when all three of them were hanged for their crimes, their bodies left swinging at the bay’s entrance as a warning.

Tuyet had seen them, had seen their bodies swaying in the wind, except now they’re here, right in front of her eyes. They can’t be ghosts, can they? She’s touching this ship, she can see them, can hear them, they don’t look translucent or like they’re stuck in a time loop. They look solid, real, alive.

She doesn’t understand it, and so she stays, and watches. Ana doesn’t touch John, but Maria does, little moments of skin against skin that could mean everything, or nothing. By the way they were talking earlier – are they together? Ana doesn’t seem bothered by the other woman’s hands on her husband, and she can’t imagine that Ana would be one to swallow her anger or her pride if it did bother her, not based on everything she’s heard about her.

Crew members smile at John but skirt around the women. John is either completely relaxed or very good at faking it, and why shouldn’t he be? They’re alone in the middle of the sea, and even if they’re pirates on the run with every navy in the world after them – they’re alone in the middle of the ocean, and it’s calm enough that they can see for miles all around them. They should all be relaxed. It makes sense for them to be relaxed. John _is_ relaxed.

But Maria and Ana aren’t.

Maria’s making a good play at it, but the longer Tuyet watches them, the less Mara’s little touches seem flirtatious and the more they seem anxious, like she has to keep reaching out to John to reassure herself that he’s there. Ana’s eyes are always scanning the sea, like she’s looking for something. Have they just outrun someone, maybe?

“Bed, darling?” John asks, reaching out for the first time to run the back of a single finger against Ana’s cheek. It occurs to Tuyet that darling is both a term of affection, and a form of address, considering it’s the name they share.

Ana smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “You two go. I’ll keep watch.”

“We’re safe out here,” John says, and because of how he’s turned he doesn’t see the way that Maria flinches. “Come to bed.”

Ana’s gaze flickers down to him, and she leans just enough to press her forehead to his before pulling away. “Not tonight, darling.”

John sighs, but gets to his feet, making a point of stretching with his back to the them.

Maria raises an eyebrow. Ana whispers, so quietly that it’s only due to the spell that Tuyet can hear her, “I feel like we’re being watched.”

Tuyet ducks down, even though if they haven’t noticed her yet it’s unlikely they will, and nothing they could do even if they did see her. She feels something like guilt squirming in the bottom of her stomach, and she risks one more glance. Ana’s arms are crossed as her eyes dart around her, and Maria and John are walking below deck together.

She’s done enough spying for one night, even if it’s left her with more questions than answers, and she dives back below the waves, heading back to Caligula’s cave.

Except the moment she enters the cave, she knows that something is wrong. Caligula’s eyes are wide and wild in way they haven’t been in weeks, and she fear curls at the base of her spine before she even comprehends what’s happening. Caligula grabs her hair and yanks her close, running her nose up her neck and inhaling deeply. “Where were you?”

“Am – am I late?” she asks, trembling. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be.”

“Shut up and answer the question,” the sea witch snaps.

“I, um, I was just watching some humans, on a ship,” she says, wanting to pull away, but knowing that she’ll only make it worse for herself if she makes a show of resisting.

Caligula’s grip on her hair tightens, to the point that Tuyet feels her nails prick the skin of her scalp. It’s not on purpose, so she says nothing, in case it does become on purpose. “What was the ship?”

“Big?” she tries, and swallows when Caligula’s eyes narrow. “I don’t know, I wasn’t looking, I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she finally let’s go of her, and Tuyet resists the urge to check for tacky blood sticking to her hair. “Take me there.”

“It’s just a human ship,” she protests.

Caligula sneers, pusher herself into her face, so close and overwhelming that it might be less frightening if she was grabbing her rather than this, “Did I ask? I’m not angry at you, girl, but keep it up and I will be.”

Tuyet flinches. Most of the sea witch’s cruelty is thoughtless, casual, something she does without thinking. Her rage is truly frightening, in ways that make her uncomfortable to contemplate. “Okay.”

She guides Caligula back to the ship, and she’s expecting this to be a waste of time, for Caligula to see that this is nothing more than another of the many pirate ships that cross their sea, and then they’d leave, Caligula frustrated, perhaps, but in the end none of them truly worse for wear than when they’d started.

That’s not what happens.

“Finally,” Caligula breathes, and before Tuyet gets a chance to question her, the water the sea witch is in rises to deposit her on the deck, and when it retreats she’s perfectly dry, her pure white hair gently curled but her fishnet dress still clinging to her the same as it does in the sea.

Crewman are screaming, some of them running below deck and some of them going so far as to jump off the ship, which just seems poorly thought out to her. They’re so far from land, it’s not like they can swim to safety. They should have at least taken a rowboat.

Ana doesn’t even get to her feet, still sitting down, but she can’t hide her reaction completely. She’s gone an unnatural shade of pale, a color no one who spends so much time under the sun should be. Maria and John come bursting out of the bottom of the ship, pushing past people who are trying to get beneath, their clothes having clearly been put on a hurry.

“Sea witch,” John sneers, pushing Maria behind him even as he goes to stand in front of his wife. “Leave our ship, you have no reason to be here. We have no quarrel with you.”

Ana stands and touch’s John’s shoulder, pulling him back. She says, softly, “That’s not true, exactly.”

He pauses, then turns on her. There’s fear and horror in his voice when he asks, “What did you do?” but no anger.

“Saved your life, of course,” Caligula purrs, slinking forward, “and their own. But it was not free. I do not work for free.”

“Caligula,” Maria says coldly, and Tuyet can’t hide her surprise. Humans who know of her are so afraid to say her name, just in case it invokes her, in case she hears it whispered even when she’s all alone in her cave at the bottom of the ocean. “We paid your price. A baby you demanded, and baby Ana lost. Now leave.”

John’s face goes blank and cold for the first time. He glances back at Ana, but she won’t look at him, won’t take her eyes off of Caligula.

“It was supposed to be twins,” she hisses, “I was promised twins. I’m _owed_ twins. However,” she concedes, “my circumstances have changed since we last spoke. I suppose I could be satisfied by simply one more child.”

Tuyet’s breath catches in her throat. She knows what happened, what must have happened.

The potential of an unborn life is a powerful thing. Of unborn twins, even more so. Caligula must have drained that life from Ana’s body before the child was born, must have bottled and saved it, or maybe even tried and failed to use it to restore her trident.

“We don’t have any more children,” Ana says, and she’s steady, but she must have some sort of tell, because John and Maria both look to her, concern in the crinkle of their brows.

Caligula smiles, her sharp teeth even more unnatural above the water. “You don’t. But she does.”

It takes everyone a beat to realize she’s looking at Maria.

“No,” John says as Maria presses her hands to her stomach, eyes wide. Ana looks sick.

They hadn’t even known she was pregnant until just now.

Felicity’s crown feels tight and heavy around her throat, and Tuyet can’t just watch this happen, can’t be silent and complicit in this. One dead princess was enough, was too much, and she made a promise to herself, and if it kills her to keep it, then so be it.

“Stop!” she shouts, and the water rises to deposit her onto the ship, putting her in between the pirates and Caligula. Except she doesn’t have legs, so she’s forced to sit on the floor, pushing herself up as much as she can and ignoring the pain as he scales drag against the wood of ship.

Maria and Ana take a startled step back, but John barely seems surprised at her entrance, never mind her existence. She can’t be the first mermaid he’s seen.

Caligula raises an eyebrow, looking at her then over, dismissing her presence is under a second. “Leave. I don’t need you for anything else.”

“No,” she says, has to force herself not to hunch over at the icy glare that gets her. “No, I won’t leave, and I won’t let you hurt them or take anything else from them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> are ana, maria, and john a blatent rip off from the historical figures anne bonney, mary read, and jack rackham? yes. yes they are. 
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	3. Chapter 3

Tuyet has no idea what she’s doing.

“You don’t need them,” she tries. “You have me. How much more magic can one unborn life really give you, compared to what I’m giving you?”

Caligula sneers. “You idiotic girl, haven’t you figured it out yet? It’s not about the power I have.”

She stares, her mouth falling open and all her arguments and pleadings abandoning her. “What? You love power. You want it.” It’s why you want me, she doesn’t add.

“No,” she says, slinking closer, “you’re not listening, child. It’s not about the power I have. It’s about the power I _take_.”

Oh.

Caligula could have all the power in the world, and it would never be enough. Because it’s not about what she has. It’s about what she can take and steal and trick out of other people, it’s not about what she can gain, it’s about what she can make others lose. She’ll never be satisfied until everyone is left with nothing, until there’s nothing left for her to take.

She lifts her hand in the air, gathering magic into the palm of her hand. Caligula throws her head back and laughs. “You think you can fight me? You know parlor tricks. There’s no amount of power that can make up for a lack of skill.”

That’s not true, exactly, but it’s true for her. She may be stronger than Caligula, her royal blood rich in magic and the sea witch’s abuse having brought that magic to the fore, but Caligula has been using magic for a long time, has fought many battles and come out the winner. There’s no spell destructive enough or quick enough to destroy Caligula before she outsmarts her.

But that’s not what she’s trying to do.

“Invenient,” she casts, then blows on her hand, scattering the reverse tracking spell to every crevice of the sea.

Caligula isn’t laughing anymore. “What are you doing?” she hisses, stalking forward.

Tuyet tries to pull herself backward but there’s nowhere for to go. She flinches when Caligula grabs her hair and tugs her upright, pulling her close to her face and forcing most of her body weight to be supported just by the grip on her head. “My father will follow that spell, and he’ll come here. You’re right. I can’t beat you. But he can.”

Her father had never bothered with Caligula before, had just warned Tuyet and her sisters against going near her and said that those who sought out the sea witch got what they deserved. He’ll be furious with her for becoming one of those people, for what she’s done, for her lies and betrayal and the people she hurt. But it’s better, still, than the alternative.

She wouldn’t love her prince if he abandoned his people. How can she expect him to love her if she abandons hers? She’s still a princess, of royal blood and royal duty. She has to protect her people.

“Foolish girl!” Caligula cries. “He’ll lock you up for what you’ve done, if you’re lucky, and you’ll never see your prince again! Is that what you want?”

“No,” she answers, and crying underwater is so much better, it’s less messier, more dignified. There’s determination in her refusal, but not dignity. Her face is puffy and she has to hold herself half upright on this boat, the pain tugging at her scales, all the power in her blood and she can’t even put herself upright. “But the price for my happiness is too high. I can’t pay it.”

She should have done this before, when Princess Felicity died she should have done this, but she was desperate and a coward. If she’d been smarter, she would have figured this out long before Felicity, and she could have called her father and locked up Caligula months ago, and then Felicity would be alive, would be married, and then Elias and his island would be safe. 

But instead it’s all chaos, all death and fear, because she’s been stupid, and she refuses to let it continue. 

Caligula snarls. “That tracking spell won’t work on your corpse, girl.” 

She sees Caligula’s claws coming for her, and she covers her face, knowing it won’t do her any good, that Caligula can curse the breath from her lungs without needing to touch her at all, just like she did to Felicity. 

Then there are legs at her back, supporting her, and Caligula stops short. 

“Hey now,” John says, mildly, and Tuyet tilts her head back to see his arm extended, a pistol aimed at the space between Caligula’s eyes. 

A gun should mean nothing to her, should be child’s play, but the sea witch isn’t laughing. Instead she’s frozen in place, and for the first time that Tuyet has ever seen, she looks afraid. “Where did you get that?” 

“Don’t mind that,” he says, still completely relaxed, a smile hovering around the corner of his mouth even now. “If you take another step toward this lady, I’ll shoot.” 

Tuyet twists around, and Ana and Maria are looking at John in surprise, some part of this is clearly something they haven’t seen before, is something that they hadn’t expected. 

Apparently someone doesn’t become an infamous pirate captain solely due to having fearsome wives. 

“It’ll kill you,” Caligula warns. “All the trouble your women went through to save your life, the child they bargained away, and you’d throw your life away right in front of them?” 

There’s a threat of compulsion interwoven into Caligula’s words, a spell that’s not actually a spell. Tuyet tries to open her mouth to warn him, to say anything at all, but nothing will come out. 

“To protect them?” he asks, just as steady as before, completely unruffled and unaffected by Caligula’s voice. Tuyet doesn’t understand how he’s doing that. He’s just a human. Isn’t he? “Of course I would. You make a move toward this lady, or either of my wives, or myself, and I’ll pull this trigger and ensure it’ll be the last thing you ever do. “

“Then pulling that trigger will be the last you do,” Caligula says, but she doesn’t say it like a threat.

He shrugs, his shoulders rising and falling under his pretty coat.

They stare at each other for several tense moments, and Tuyet can do nothing but wait, hoping her father arrives before anything terrible can happen.

Caligula flinches.

She’s looking into the ocean, eyebrows pushed together until they shoot to her forehead. “My trident!” she cries. “Stupid girl, you sent him to the trident!”

Tuyet doesn’t get a chance to react to that before Caligula is turning and diving into the ocean, leaving them all behind.

John reholsters his gun and leans down to press his hand against her shoulder. “You alright there?”

“John,” Maria starts, but then doesn’t say anything else.

“I’m angry with you both,” he says, but he doesn’t say it like he’s angry, his voice isn’t tight or mean or loud. He says it simply, as if his anger is a simple thing. “I’m not sure what mess you’ve gotten yourself into, but Caligula isn’t the person to help you out of it. I don’t think you should go back to her. Stay here.”

It takes Tuyet a moment to realize that John is talking to her and not his wives.

“No,” she says finally, mouth dry for the first time in her life. “No, I can’t. I have to go back in the water.” 

“You don’t,” John starts, but Tuyet doesn’t stay around to listen, summoning a wave to crash over the boat, not to capsize it or hurt anyone, but just to drag her back into the ocean. 

She wants to stay, or at least not to go, but where can she go that her father won’t be able to find her, eventually? Before, she was to escape to land, to where her family couldn’t follow her even if they tried, but now she can’t. 

She’s done the right thing, but it’s cost her everything she’s wanted so desperately. She’ll never dig her feet into hot, dry sand. Never walk among a marketplace. Never get the chance to see her prince again. 

But her people will be safe from Caligula. Her father will lock up the sea witch, and her too probably, for running away, for everything. Maybe if he’s especially angry he’ll have her and Caligula share a cell, so that she can continue torturing her, and by the time her father lets her out again, Elias’s bones will be dust. 

It’s no wonder that people so rarely do the right thing, if it always hurts this much. 

She could probably hide from her father, for a while, the ocean is large. But all it would take is one blow from the conch to get every sea creature to go searching for her, and there’s no place where she’s completely alone, where not a single living thing could find her, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in it. Hiding won’t save her, it’ll just make her father angrier, will just make her punishment worse than it’ll be already. 

So she doesn’t hide, and she doesn’t run. 

She goes back to Caligula’s cave to face the music, propelling herself through the ocean with her magic. Better to catch her father while he’s still at the cave than meeting him back at the palace. At least this way he can get the initial explosion and yelling out while they’re not in front of everyone. 

The smell hits her before anything else, something rotten and foul and burning, acrid even. Smoke doesn’t last in the ocean, but she can taste it in the water around her. She approaches the cave slower, cautiously. Surely Caligula wouldn’t do something as foolish as try and resist the king of the sea? She’s powerful, sure, but he’s King Proteus, born of Pallas. Caligula is many things, but stupid is not among them.

“Absconditum,” she whispers, waiting until the rush of magic covers her, cloaking her from sight, then slips into the cave, hugging the edges so as to not accidentally bump into something and alert them to her presence. 

What she sees isn’t exactly what she expected. 

Her father is _furious_, angrier than she’s ever seen him, and that fury seems to make him appear larger, even though he can’t even grow that much in the cave’s cramped space. His electric blue eyes are cold and hard, his dark, silver streaked hair floats around his head, the conch shell swaying from his hip while the bottom of his dark silver tail moves back and forth in agitation.

Caligula clutches the half-restored trident, shrinking down on herself, appearing small for the first time. “Please, no - it’s not what it seems-”

“My daughter,” he says thunderously, “for your trident? What were you thinking?” 

Is Caligula trying to bargain her away? Does her dad think she’s locked away or restrained somewhere? She opens her mouth, preparing to say something, to let her dad know that Caligula doesn’t have her and therefor doesn’t have anything to bargain with. 

She doesn’t get the chance. 

Proteus opens his clenched hands, and a dozen cone snails float out of his hands, and Tuyet’s eyes widen. 

As little girls, her grandmother would weave cone snails into her and her sisters’ hair. Tuyet thought they were beautiful, and didn’t understand that they were protection, like the ancient goblin sharks that were their constant companions. As royalty, they’re immune to the cone snail’s venom. 

But Caligula isn’t. 

The barbs sink into her skin before she even has a chance to scream, and that would kill a sperm whale several times over, but maybe it wouldn’t be enough even for Caligula, because she wasn’t born with magic in her blood but she certainly has poured enough of into her veins, has turned herself inside out to control magic the way she does, and maybe that would be enough to save her. 

But this attack isn’t magical, and she doesn’t have the time to mount any sort of defense against it before it kills her, her body falling to the ground as the snails go floating towards the top of the cave. 

Tuyet is so surprised she doesn’t even remember to breathe. Proteus looks at Caligula’s corpse, just as still as her, but then he leans down and grabs the trident from the ground and plunges it into Caligula’s chest with such force that it breaks through her ribcage and pierces her heart. The blood swirls around the trident, coating it and drying faster than it should, flaking off in the next moment, leaving it shining and silver. 

It’s finally completely restored. 

“Was it worth it?” Proteus asks, his quiet voice unbearably loud in the stillness of the cave. “First the earthquake, then this? Why did you think I would forgive that?”

Tuyet flinches, flattening herself back against the cave wall and hunching her shoulders to her ears.

She hadn’t meant to make the earthquake.

Her father reaches out for the trident, but then stops. His eyebrows dip together, and he reaches for it again before stopping and making a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. It’s powerful, Tuyet knows that, but her father must hate it so much to not even claim that power for his own, to at the very least keep it out of someone else’s hands by taking it back the palace and locking it in the vault. He exits the cave, and Tuyet watches him go, saying nothing. If he doesn’t sense her, if the tracking spell led him to all the magic she’d pushed into the trident instead of to herself, if he’s so upset over the earthquake that he’d kill Caligula over it, then there’s no reason for her to reveal herself.

Maybe this is the middle line. Her father doesn’t know how to find her, maybe isn’t even looking for her, maybe this is the closest to freedom she’s ever going to get. She doesn’t get legs, doesn’t get true freedom and markets and a life among humans. But neither is she shunned or locked away in the palace, neither is she forced to sit in a cell for years watching the world pass her by.

She drops the invisibility spell and swims to Caligula’s corpse, sitting on the ground beside her, looking at her wide open eyes and her body which is still leaking blood that dissipates around her. She holds out a hand, and the cone snails gently fall into it, small and beautiful and not looking anything close to deadly. She does as her grandmother did and weaves them into hair, just in case.

Her future has never seemed so uncertain, and she feels like she could use the extra protection.

The trident gleams silver even in the weak light of the cave, and Tuyet bled for it, she learned magic for this trident, and she doesn’t know she’s reaching for it until it’s in her hand.

It feels heavy, and cold. She thought it would be different, now that it’s complete, she thought it would feel electric, would feel alive, but of course it doesn’t.

The trident isn’t a person. It’s a tool. Maybe her father couldn’t bring himself to take the trident, but clearly she doesn’t have that same problem. Maybe her time with Caligula broke her more than she thought, if she does so thoughtlessly something her father wouldn’t. 

“Um, excuse me,” a small voice asks quietly, and Tuyet turns, defensively thrusting the trident in front of her, but it’s just a merman peering into the edge of the cave. “Are you the sea witch?”

From this angle, he can’t see the bloody corpse on the cave floor.

She glances down and silently casts the same spell she had on Felicity’s body, so that Caligula turns into nothing more than sea foam. For Felicity, it was a kindness, but this is just to Caligula’s body out of the way. Tuyet can’t even feel that guilty about it. It’s not like anyone was going to sing any mourning songs for her anyway.

Is this the answer, then? What else is she to do, with this tenuous freedom? She knows magic. Maybe not as much as Caligula had, but enough, and now that she can go through her scrolls maybe she can learn even more, can become someone with her own power that she uses for herself.

Maybe she can fill the place Caligula had taken up, and maybe she can do it better, do it differently.

“Yes,” she answers, gripping the trident. “I am. What do you want?”

He breaks into a grin, confidently swimming closer. “I need help killing my mother. She’s won’t let me do anything, keeps going on about bettering myself and not wasting her money, and she’s going to live forever and keep all her money to herself out of spite, can you-”

It takes her longer than it should to make the connection between the trident humming against her hand, the rage rising like bile in the back of her throat, and the merman cowering and terrified against cave wall, angry burns arcing across his chest.

She could heal him. She doesn’t.

“Get out,” she says, watching with dispassionate eyes as he skitters away from her.

Maybe not, then.

~

Tuyet wonders if Caligula started out terrible, if she was always awful and she stumbled into this life and this magic because she’s awful, or if this life made her awful instead.

People keep asking her for such terrible things. For death, in so many ways with so many variations, and so rarely does it feel anything close to justified. The thing is, death is easy, torture is easy, so much of the terrible things are easy to do, are simple magics.

Two weeks into studying all the scrolls she’d never been allowed to touch before, she understands why Caligula did nothing for free.

The cost for the other types of magic is so high. It’s not an economical toll, because that would be easier, she still has the fortune in pearls she took from the royal stores, unless she attempts to recreate the lavish lifestyle that was afforded to her when she lived in the palace, then she won’t need to worry about money for a long time.

Healing sickness is almost impossible, and of course people don’t come to her with broken bones or stab wounds, things she could fix for as little as a lock of hair or a handful of scales, no one’s ever desperate enough to call a sea witch for that. It’s for the illness that sickens from the inside, for rotting bones and hearts that can’t beat properly.

The scrolls call for things like a young boy’s last breath, the still beating hearts of several dozen dolphins, and people’s firstborns. 

The real magic, the kind that can do those sorts of things, doesn’t come cheap. 

It doesn’t take that long to find the spell that would give her legs, would give her a chance at freedom, and she discovers that Caligula hadn’t told her the whole truth, had left out a very important part.

She’s a mermaid, with a cold sea heart, and she won’t survive on the surface, not forever. For a while, maybe, she’d be okay, and then her ice heart would melt and she would die. The only way to prevent that, to allow her to keep her legs and her sunshine, would be to replace her heart with that of a human, one that had been freely given.

If she’d managed to get her prince, if Prince Elias had fallen in love with her, she would have either had to convince him to kill himself or leave him, because the type of magic that would allow her to keep her happiness is the kind of magic that she can’t afford.

She can break things apart and run magic through the earth until it split open, could tear this world in two, and that would come cheap. But mending a broken heart has such a high toll - eight dry faced maidens - that she can’t imagine anyone could ever manage it. 

So instead she does what she can. 

For the heartbroken and grief-stricken, she takes away the memories of those they lost, and they don’t hurt anymore. For those that are sick, she can work only with what she has. She can replace a faulty liver if she has another one handy, and too many loved one come to her, pleading with her to give them the illness instead, to let those they care for keep on living even while they give themselves a death sentence. 

The first time a woman comes to her, red eyed and clutching an unmoving bundle, her heart breaks. 

“I can’t awaken the dead,” she says, and she’s not gentle with people often these days, since they so often take that gentleness and twist it to weakness. 

“Please,” she says softly, “please, I can’t hide this, and his mother will be back soon.” 

Tuyet goes cold. 

“I just got so angry,” she says, and tips the bundle. Tuyet’s stomach rolls at the bruised face of the baby, of the way his neck hangs at an awkward angle. “Can’t you fix it? They don’t usually break like this.” 

“Usually?” she repeats, numb. 

She nods, mouth drooping at the corner. “They get so loud, and I want them to be quiet. They go quiet, eventually, and then I say they rolled over or got sick. But I can’t do that with this one. Can’t you fix his neck?” 

She doesn’t want Tuyet to bring the child back to life. She wants her to help her cover up a murder, to cover up one of the many murders she seems to have committed. 

“Yes,” she says, holding out her hand so the trident floats into her grasp, “yes, I can fix it.” 

The spell to fix a broken neck and bruises is easy, even on a corpse. The one to erase all of the woman’s memories is harder, but easier after she’s sacrificed the woman’s arm and a quarter of her tail to the spell. Quickening the baby’s heartbeat requires both the woman’s eyeballs and her tongue to get it going, and then squeezing the blood from her heart to complete. 

The soul transfer is obviously the most difficult, especially with her limited time, and she needs to use a spell to strip the woman’s flesh from her bones, and then grind those bones into dust, which she forces into the baby’s lungs, calcifying them to every inch, and an incantation that burns her lips to recite. 

It’s quick, and easier than she thinks it should be, but it seems it takes no time at all to turn the woman into a pile of oozing flesh and to have a living, breathing, curious baby in her arms. 

She can’t bring back the child the woman killed. But luckily, at this age, most babies seem much like any other. 

“May your wickedness have been a learned habit rather than an inevitability,” she tells the baby, tells the woman’s soul she stuffed into this form. “It would be a shame for your mother to raise a monster.” 

Then presents the problem of how she’s supposed to return the baby. A tracking spell to find his mother is easy enough, but it’s not exactly like she can go swimming into the middle of a city. 

So far, no one has recognized her, has had no reason to recognize her, since she and her family spend much of their time deeper in the ocean than most of their subjects can swim. The rumors of a new sea witch have spread far, and if her father has heard them, then he hasn’t cared, hasn’t wanted to cause any issue by pointing out he killed the last one. It makes people nervous when their king goes around killing subjects, even ones that everyone knows to be wicked. Maybe especially those ones, since as Tuyet is discovering, so many of her people are wicked. 

She can’t go into the city, at least not for this, it’s just not worth the risk. But going to all this trouble to make something that the mother will recognize as her baby will all be for nothing if she can’t get the baby to his mother. 

The conch shell which can compel those creatures around her hangs on her father’s hip. But that doesn’t mean she can’t ask one to do her a favor. 

It does mean, however, that if she’s going to get a helper, it should be someone that her father can’t compel. Which is every being of the sea. So she needs something that is not of the sea. 

She whistles, the sound leaving her lips and being carried far past her cave, to the ocean’s depth. She just hopes her father doesn’t hear it. He won’t know it’s her, of course, it’s not like this is something he ever taught her how to do, but he’ll know what she’s doing, and that might just be enough to pique his curiosity about the new sea witch, which she obviously doesn’t want. 

For several long minutes, nothing happens, and she takes that as a no. She supposes she’ll have to find another solution, perhaps crafting a cradle that she can enchant to go to city? But it does leave the baby vulnerable to being eaten or something else terrible. Which, again, ruins the point of going to all this effort in the first place. 

The ground shakes, and at first she thinks it’s another earthquake, except this one not of her own making. Except that it gets bigger, and closer, and she’s smiling as she exits the cave, the baby held to her chest.

The massive head of a sea serpent breaks through the soft earth, sliding through the water to surround her, coiling his huge body around her, his head swaying above and tilted down.

Cetus has lived in the earth, was crafted by Oceanus’s hands before there was an ocean, and although he lives in the sea he’s doesn’t fall under her father’s control, is something else that lives in the depths of the sea that her father and grandmother always warned her against chasing.

But she’s not chasing anything. Cetus is the one who came to her.

“I need this returned,” she says, holding out the baby.

Cetus goes closer, growing in size until one of his eyes is as wide as she is tall, until she only see the clear silver of his one eye and nothing else. Then he squirms and shifts back down, until he takes the form of a dark silver octopus and plucks the child out her hands with his tentacles.

“Thank you,” she says, and a tentacle trails down the side of her face before Cetus propels himself forward towards the city.

She thinks that will be the last of it, that she asked for a favor and he gave it and he’ll go back to whatever sea monsters who are older than the ocean they reside in do with their infinite spare time.

Except the next day a serpent is slithering around the edges of her cave, pretty silver scales, and there’s only one explanation for that. “Hello,” she says, “can I help you with something?”

Cetus doesn’t say anything, although she’s sure he could if he wanted to. She can speak with plenty of sea creatures, and he’s much more than that, she’s sure he could twist himself into any sort of form he wanted if he felt the need to speak to her directly. He circles the trident, and she half expects him to curl around it, but he doesn’t touch it, instead choosing to drape himself around her ankle.

“Stay as long as you’d like,” she says, because it’s not like she could stop him anyway. She’s the sea witch now, is a princess and the daughter of King Proteus, but she’s not foolish. Not anymore, anyway. If Cetus wanted to eat her, wanted to swallow her whole, then he could, and there’s no magic or protection she has at her disposal that would be able to stop him.

His presence is a good thing, really. It helps her feel less lonely, gives her something to focus on that’s not her own anger and pain and sadness. It helps, but it doesn’t heal, and if she wasn’t broken before, she surely is now.

The woman who’d killed the baby had been the first person she ever killed with her own hands. Felicity she killed through her foolishness, and she hasn’t asked too many questions over where some of the desperate people that come to her get the ingredients that she requests. But she’s always been able to reign in her rage and disgust, to smother those violent impulses that she can’t remember having before, but not with that woman, not that time.

Was she always like this, deep down? She doesn’t think so. But she doesn’t think it’s the magic doing this to her either. Her thoughts and feelings are her own. This has to just be the result of seeing the worst of people, over and over again, or maybe the best of people, sometimes, but in the worst way possible. She was soft before. She’s not soft now, and she misses it, in an abstract sort of way. No one would dare take advantage of her now, would dare hurt her. But she misses the girl she was before she picked up Caligula’s trident and her title, the girl who didn’t know the worst and best that people were capable of.

It’s turned her into the type of person who kills a woman and thinks nothing of it. Sure, she was a murderer, a baby killer several times over. But she’s still the type of person who twists a murder’s soul into a shape that will fit into an infant body, and she’s not sure which of those transgressions are worse.

Whatever she is now, it’s not who she was before, what she was before, and she’s not sure that it’s a good thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you like it! feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	4. Chapter 4

Tuyet has been acting as the sea witch for nearly a year now, and she’s not happy, exactly. In fact, she thinks she might be miserable, in this forgotten piece of the ocean doing terrible things for terrible people, or sometimes for good person, which hurts worse. She has Cetus, at least, but he’s her only companion, and he’s still never spoke to her. 

She doesn’t understand why an ancient sea monster seems content to be at her side and do her bidding when he could swallow the sea if he wanted. But he doesn’t swallow the sea, is instead a small jellyfish floating next to her head more often than not, and she can’t bring herself to press the issue. 

Without him, she’d be completely alone. 

It’s a full moon, so she’s searching for whale hip bones. If she can manage to both find one and grind it tonight, the resulting powder will be especially powerful. It might even be able to take the place of a child’s bone marrow in a couple of her more frequently requested spells. 

She has this to comfort herself with, at least – no matter how jaded and bitter and cruel she fears she’s becoming, she’s at least trying to reduce the collateral damage from her spells, which is something that Caligula never did. 

It’s a cold comfort, even to herself, but it’s not like there’s anyone to call her on it. 

This all means when she feels a tugging in the base of her spine, the familiar feeling of someone summoning her, she almost ignores it. She’s busy, but she can tell it’s someone summoning her above the water, which means it’s a human. Humans don’t summon her unless they’re desperate or stupid, and if nothing else it’s at least usually interesting. 

The night is young, she decides, following the tugging sensation to her summoner. She’ll have plenty of time to find the hip bone after she deals with this. 

It’s near the shore, rather than from a boat, which presents a moment of difficulty until she finds a rock suitably close to the shoreline to heave herself on top of, leaning on her side with her tail trailing over the side. 

“Who summons me?” she demands, turning her head to face the human, and she feels her cold heart drop into her stomach. 

Prince Elias is kneeling in the sand, blood dripping from his hand into the conch shell as tears drip down his face. “Are – are you the sea witch?” 

She’s hasn’t been this close to him since she’d saved his life. He’s more beautiful than she’d remembered. She tries to answer him, but her mouth is dry. 

“Of course you are. S-sorry. I,” his face crumples, “please, I need your help. I – my country is in the middle of the war, and my parents – they – I can’t take the throne unwed, and things are hard enough already, but I can’t get any allies unless I’m able to speak to my neighbors as a king, and none of the neighboring kingdoms will risk sending me a bride, not when it’s so dangerous, not when what happened to the last one, and my council won’t let me marry a commoner, and,” he pauses, drawing in a ragged breath, “please. Help me. We’re at war, and I need a queen to stand a chance in it. My people need a queen.”

A lot of things run through Tuyet’s mind just then. She could slip back into the ocean and pretend none of this ever happened. She could arrange the safe passage of a princess of his choosing. She could capsize his enemies. 

But some part of her is still the foolish, ignorant girl that went begging to Caligula. Some part of her is too selfish and too needy to deny, no matter the consequences. 

“What are you willing to give up?” she asks. 

“Anything,” he answers, and it sounds like it’s pulled from the base of him, raw and desperate and primal. “Absolutely anything. Please. I can’t help them like this. I’m no use to them like this.” 

Summoning the trident to her hand is easy, and she slips into the water and uses some of the terrible power stored inside it. Her tail splits in two and changes, morphing into something else, and when she walks onto the shore, completely naked, Elias keeps his eyes on her face. She holds out a hand and pulls him to his feet, his hand is rough in hers, and she has to force herself to let it go. 

“A queen for your kingdom, then,” she says, and goes on her tip toes, pressing herself into him, but she stops herself just in time, her lips almost to his lips. 

He has to choose this. She can’t take it. He must give it. 

He seems to realize this, because he closes the last inch between them, seizing her shoulders and kissing her, pouring all his desperation into it. She deepens the kiss, and cuts his tongue on her teeth, drinking down the few drops of blood. 

These types of things can’t just be sealed with a kiss, after all. Blood is the only currency that carries any weight. 

~

Elias gives her his shirt to wear back to the walk to the palace. He’s eyeing her warily, as he should, and he speaks for the first time since she kissed him as they’re about to leave the beach and walk towards his palace. “You – you’re not – you’ll help me, won’t you?” 

“You should have gotten any assurances about your people’s safety before we sealed our bargain,” she says, but only smiles at his fear. 

She didn’t used to be like this. But the person she was wouldn’t be able to help him like she’ll be able to. 

“I’ll make you a king, and save your island,” she says, “I take care of my own, and your island is mine now.” 

She’d been willing to give up her freedom and happiness for her people, and now this island’s occupants are her people too. 

Their bargain had been clear, after all. She’ll give him a queen in exchange for the kingdom. She’ll be his queen if he gives her his kingdom. 

She won’t be able to keep it, of course, but he doesn’t know that, and she’s not planning to tell him. 

~

They spin a story, and Tuyet weaves enough compulsion in her words when she tells it that people believe it, believe her. 

She’s a princess sent from the southern islands, the youngest of seven daughters. They were hoping that sending her would secure an alliance with the island, but her boat was attacked by pirates and destroyed. She barely managed to swim ashore on some driftwood. 

It’s a ridiculous story, but even without the compulsion, she doesn’t think they’d care. She’s willing to honor her supposed island’s intention, to marry their prince and make him a king, and after everything, well, they need a princess. They need a princess to marry their prince so that he may be king. 

They need a queen. 

If they look at her distrustfully, if conversations hush when she walks down a hall, well. 

They’re more right to be wary of her than they know. It’s not as if she’s going to punish such good instincts. 

The wedding is set for the next day, what with Elias nearly vibrating with eagerness to become king, to actually do something for his island. She’d find it cute if it wasn’t all so hopeless. 

Well, it’s hopeless anymore, she supposes. Now they have her. She moves into the room next to Elias’s, and her lack of clothing would be a problem, except it isn’t, of course. 

There’s a whole closet of clothes fit for a queen right there, waiting for her. 

Tuyet slides on a dead woman’s dress, and it makes her skin itch. She’s pretending to be human, but that’s it, she’s not lying about anything else. She won’t put on a skin that doesn’t belong to her when her own still fits. 

“I need thread,” she says, poking her head out and speaking to the guard at her door. He’s useless of course, when she’s so much stronger than any mortal man, but they’re not supposed to know that. “Lots of thread. A needle. Some scissors, perhaps.” 

She could summon them, except she can’t, because even if no one would ask her where they came from, she can’t be frivolous with her magic anymore. The more of it she uses, the less time she has until the spell on her becomes impossible to maintain.

He stares at her, unresponsive, and she makes a frustrated sound in the back of her throat, wishing she could just electrocute him until an answer pops out of his mouth and be on her way. 

The thought surprises her enough that she pauses, mouth open, and closes it again. 

This isn’t her first time in a palace. She was raised in one far grander than this, raised a princess of a far greater kingdom than this one, and not once has she ever wanted to hurt her people. Not wanting to hurt her people is what landed her in the position of the second sea witch to begin with, when she could have just let Caligula continue chipping away at her and at her kingdom.

She’s gotten too used to dealing with the type of people who seek her out, and there are only two types of those. Either they’re terrible people wanting terrible things, or they’re desperate and all the more dangerous because of it. 

But he’s not either of those things. He’s her guard, the man Elias personally chose to stand in front of her door and keep her from harm. Or well, at least to give the appearance of keeping her from harm, since it’s not like she needs it, magic or no magic.

“What’s your name?” she asks. 

He still doesn’t say anything, and she can already feel herself swinging back around to irritation even as she tries to stop herself. She used to have more patience than this, if not for herself than at least for others. But that’s been missing recently too, like she used up all her patience waiting for Caligula to give her legs and now there’s nothing left. 

“We have a seamstress in the castle,” the guard says finally. “She can alter the clothes.” 

“That’s not what I asked,” she says, too sharp, and he doesn’t do anything as indecorous as flinch, but she notices for the first time that he’s nervous. Maybe even afraid. Of her. 

She’s nothing more than a frail human woman, as far as he knows. What does he have to be scared about? 

He’s back to being silent, and she pinches the bridge of her nose. “Look, if I’ve done something to offend you, I apologize,” not really, “so can you please speak to me in full sentences?” 

His eyes dart around them, then he’s looking straight ahead, at the empty space over her shoulder. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you, and you’re not supposed to be talking to me. You’re supposed to pretend I’m not here. If someone saw me speaking, I’d be in trouble.” 

For a moment Tuyet is certain he’s playing some sort of trick on her, but she doesn’t sense any sort of deceit around him. “That’s nonsense!”

His eyes dart around again. 

Tuyet grows tired of this game. “I am Princess Tuyet of royal blood, soon to be your queen, and I order you to speak with me.” 

He still hesitates, running her words over in his mind, obviously trying to see where they leave him room to be blamed if they should get caught. 

“Kraken’s beak,” she curses, “Would you like to come inside instead? Then we can speak and you don’t have to worry about anyone seeing you.” 

He turns to her, something that might be genuine irritation bleeding through. “You want me to go into the room of prince’s fiancé, unaccompanied, with said fiancé?” 

“I don’t know how else we’d manage to speak to one another from separate rooms,” she answers. Nothing that is happening seems complicated to her, but the guard is acting like she’s asking him to move mountains, when all she wants is for him to speak to her. “Is Prince Elias a cruel man? Will he cut off your fingers and burn your tongue for speaking out of turn?”

That at least seems to startle him into speaking. “No! Not at all!”

“Then what are you afraid of?” she demands.

He goes back to looking away from her. “They should have a woman guarding you, not a man.”

Oh.

He’s not afraid, exactly.

A flush crawls up the back of her neck. She – that’s – she’s the youngest of her sisters, and a princess, and no one would have dared called her beautiful in the sea, where her father’s ears were everywhere, and then, as a sea witch, anyone who found her beautiful found her useful first, and she won’t entertain something like that.

“It doesn’t matter who’s guarding me,” she declares. “Your prince chose you, and I assume he chose you for a reason. Are you going to help me or not?”

He sighs, as if he finds her irritating, and that bothers her less than it would have a moment ago. “I can get what you ask from the seamstress when my shift changes.”

“You can tell me where she is now and I can get it myself? Wonderful! Lead the way,” she gestures in front of her.

He glares. “You’re not listening to me at all.”

“I’m a princess,” she reminds him, “soon to be your queen. It’s your job to listen to me, not the other way around.” He doesn’t move and she rolls her eyes. “Fine, then I’m just going to go searching this castle on my own until I find someone helpful.”

She makes it about halfway down the hall before he’s jogging up beside her, his eyebrows pushed together. “You’re going the wrong way.”

She turns on her heal, going in the opposite direction as she had before. “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” He just glowers. “Do I get a name yet, or shall I guess?”

He struggles for a moment, but finally relents. “Darius. Your highness.” She’s almost disappointed, she had a lot of fun names to call him.

Maybe that’s why he gave in, actually. He’s a quick study.

“Thank you, Darius,” she says, and his lips quirk up in the corners.

He takes her to the servants’ quarters but hesitates at the door. “If you go in there, you’re going to make a lot of people nervous.”

“I make people nervous regardless of their station,” she informs him, “so you might as well take me where I want to go.”

He rolls his eyes, which she thinks is a wonderful bit of progress, and holds the door open.

A maid holding a stack of china sees her, squeaks, and drops the whole thing because she immediately drops into a curtsey. “Oh no!” she says, eyes wide, reaching down to pick up the mess, “I’m so sorry, your highness!” She cuts her hand on the glass, face red, and just keeps picking up more of it.

Tuyet reaches down, grabbing her wrist and pulling her back to her feet. The maid keeps her head down, and what is it with everyone here and not looking at her? “Don’t hurt yourself, it was my fault,” she says and lifts the girl’s hand up. The cut is shallow, and she wishes she could just heal her, but even if she had the energy to spare, her true nature is still a secret. She picks up the edge of her dress and rips a strip off the bottom, something she probably shouldn’t have the strength to do so easily, but hopefully the girl’s too distracted to call her on it. “Here.”

“My lady!” she gasps, “No, your dress – I can get my mother, she’s the seamstress,” she says, and flinches when Tuyet wraps the fabric tightly around the palm of her hand to stem the bleeding.

“Wonderful, just who I was looking for,” she says, and then looks over her shoulder. Her guard is smirking, and all right, he warned her, but he doesn’t need to be smug about it. “Darius, can you clean this up while I speak to this girl’s mother?”

The girl squeaks again. Darius runs a hand over his face. “You probably shouldn’t use my name in front of other people. They’ll get the wrong idea.”

“Like what? That you have a name?” She flicks her gaze to shattered dishes. “I trust that will be taken care of when I return?” She wraps an arm around the girl’s waist and begins steering her down the hall.

“Um, my lady,” the girl whispers, “it’s the other way.”

“Not a word,” she warns Darius as they walk by, and he mimes zipping his mouth shut. It’d be more reassuring if he wasn’t laughing as he did it.

The seamstress, a woman with a delicate nose and built like a mountain, hands over the requested items with only a raised eyebrow and doesn’t hesitate to give her name when asked. Tuyet decides that Fiona is her new favorite person, even if she’s probably only being accommodating because she’s up to her eyeballs in white silk. Her wedding dress, Tuyet realizes with a start, which is confirmed when Fiona demands measurements before she leaves, since it will save her trouble of tracking her down tonight. “Are you making this from scratch?” she asks.

Fiona shakes her head. “No time. I’m putting two dresses together instead. I’ll be up all night.”

“Oh.” She bites her lip, “You don’t need to do that, I can get married in anything, really.”

“This may be a political marriage, but it’s still our prince’s wedding, your highness,” Fiona says. “There’s no reason to treat it as anything less.”

“Ah, right,” she says weakly. She’d forgotten that Elias was getting married to her too, and for all that he or his people knew, it would be forever.

It won’t be. She’ll return to her ocean, and he’ll be able to remarry, to truly choose his queen without a war hanging over his head.

The seamstress’s daughter, Riley, offers to show her back to her room, and now that it’s clear Tuyet isn’t going to get mad at her, she’s a regular chatterbox.

“It’s really beautiful here in the summer,” she enthuses. “The winters are very pretty too, it snows for a little bit, and everything looks like it’s covered in diamonds. Have you ever seen snow before? You’re from the southern islands, I don’t think it snows there.”

“It doesn’t,” she says. She’s seen snow before, having swam to both poles with her sisters, but obviously she can’t say that. That kind of trip takes ships many months, if they can make it at all.

“You’ll love it,” Riley says earnestly, “and the market is really lovely, and our craftsmen are really great, you’ll see!”

Tuyet blinks. “I’m not – I’m here. I’m marrying Prince Elias tomorrow, and then he’ll be king. You don’t have to try and sell your country to me.”

Riley flushes and looks down, twirling her hair around her finger. “I just – I don’t want you to regret coming here. You lost so much, leaving you island and all the people who were supposed to come with you, and now you’re here alone, and it’s – it’s for us, mostly. I’m sure the prince we’ll help your island any way he can, but right now with all the pirate attacks, it’s a bit one sided, is all. You lose everything to be our queen, and you get nothing.”

That hits her hard. Because it’s all true, isn’t it? She lost her kingdom in her pursuit of Elias, lost her place as a princess and her home, and now here she is, further away from all of it than she’s ever been.

“I get to be queen,” she says gently, pushing all of that aside.

Riley wrings her hands together. “If the pirates win, you’ll be queen of nothing.”

Tuyet stops walking, and Riley has to double back for her. “Listen,” Tuyet says intently, “the pirates won’t win. I didn’t cross an ocean to be queen of a conquered country, so that’s not what you’ll become. Do you understand?”

This girl has no reason to believe her, to think she can do anything at all besides sitting at Elias’s side as they burn. But Riley smiles, small but honest, and she has a dimple on her left cheek. “Yes, your highness.”

The anger and bitterness that have been her constant companions seem so far away now, with Riley smiling at her, believing in her.

They’re not gone, she knows. They’ll come back the next time she’s irritated, or afraid, or mad. But right at this moment, she almost feels like she did before swimming in search of Caligula’s cave.

“Princess Tuyet,” Darius says, from way too close, and she hadn’t realized he was waiting for her at the servants’ quarters entrance. He’s giving them a strange look, but all he asks is, “Did you get what you needed?”

“Yes,” she says, and squeezes Riley’s hand before walking with Darius back to her rooms, her basket of supplies on her hips. “Thank you for cleaning up the dishes.”

He raises an eyebrow, glancing around them before whispering, “Are you sure you’re a princess?” She narrows her eyes, reaches for one of the needles Fiona had lent her, and pokes him in the side with it. “Ow!”

“Weren’t you saying something about servants being seen and not heard?” she asks, syrupy sweet, and he rolls his eyes and plucks the basket from her arms, carrying it the rest of the way to her rooms. It’d be a nice gesture if she wasn’t one hundred percent certain he was doing it to keep the needles away from her.

She takes it back when they get to her door. “Are you just going stand here all night, then?”

“Until Louis arrives,” he says. “Please don’t try and talk to him. He’ll have a heart attack and die at the impropriety of it all.”

“Sounds fun,” she says brightly, then shuts the door behind her. She leans her ear against it and can’t help the smile curling her lips when she hears him laughing.

As soon as she turns from the door, she realizes that she’s not alone. A small bird is sitting on her windowsill, his wings silver in the moonlight. he basket falls from her hands and she goes running, dropping to her knees in front of the window. “Cetus!” she whispers, “You followed me!”

He chirps, and she holds out her hand. He hops onto it, then fluffs himself up before settling into her palm.

“Thank you,” she whispers. Cetus hadn’t left the earth’s crust for thousands of years before coming when she called, and now here he is, in the air, a place he’s known to hate, just so he could follow her. “Sorry I didn’t tell you first, it all happened so suddenly.”

Cetus sneezes, then shifts, melting into a shimmering silver corn snake, just big enough to curl around her wrist like a bracelet.

“You got it,” she says warmly, “no more leaving you behind.”

He stays just like that, lying against her pulse, as she pulls all of the dead queen’s dresses out of the closet and gets to work.

Fiona may be making the dress she’ll wear tomorrow, but she has to do something about all the ones she’ll wear every day after that.

~

Tuyet is woken up way too early the next morning by someone knocking on the door.

“Come in,” she groans, and as she pushes herself up, she realizes part of the reason she feels so terrible is because she fell asleep on the floor still wearing her clothes from the day before.

“Your highness!” Riley says, closing the door behind her and placing her hands on her hips. “Momma asked me to get you ready. She’s not going to like this!”

“I’m not loving it either,” she admits, twisting her back and wincing at the pull on her muscles. She finished altering a half dozen dresses, which is great for her, but maybe she should have stopped before falling asleep mid-stitch. 

Riley clucks her tongue, sounding just like Tuyet’s grandmother, and the idea of comparing this young human girl to her ancient grandmother, the queen mother of the sea, is so preposterous that she can’t help but giggle. 

“None of that,” Riley says briskly, grabbing Tuyet’s arm and pulling her to her feet. “Come now, we have to get you cleaned up.” 

“Cleaned up?” she wonders. “I don’t have my brushes.” 

“For your hair? Don’t worry about that, we’re not going to wash it. It’ll keep its shape better that way.” Tuyet is worried about it, because she won’t be able to scrape her body clean without any brushes. Riley drags her over to a room connected to her own with a huge basin in it. She unscrews the tap, and water goes rushing into it, quickly filling it up. 

A little miniature ocean, right here in her room. Of course. Humans clean themselves off with freshwater, not with brushes. She has to resist the urge to end her spell, just for a moment, and soak her tail in the tub. Another day, perhaps. 

Riley tugs on her clothes, and Tuyet rolls her eyes before disrobing. Riley helps her wash, and luckily it seems like she doesn’t expect her to do anything but lay back and let her get to work, because Riley wouldn’t know where to start with all the lotions and creams being rubbed into her skin. “Don’t worry,” Riley says. Her blunt fingernails feel wonderful scraping against her skull as she pull’s Tuyet’s hair up in a messy ponytail so it doesn’t get in the water. “Prince Elias is really nice, so I’m sure tonight, will um, be nice too.” 

“Okay,” she says after a moment of awkward silence, feeling like she’s missing something. “Uh, thank you.” 

Riley doesn't say anything else until she urges Tuyet to her feet and wraps a towel around her. “Come on, if I hurry I can do your hair before Momma gets here.” 

“Okay,” she says, and for some reason just then misses her cone snails. She’d had to leave them in the ocean, of course, but for some reason, scrubbed clean and in this nice fluffy towel, she feels like she could use the extra protection. 

Riley pulls her hair up into a bun on top of her head, sliding sticks topped with pearls into her hair, and even takes this small stick from her pocket and uses it to edge her eyes in black, and somehow her eyes look an even deeper brown because of it. She’s just finished when Fiona bursts into her room, deep bags under her eyes, and a white dress in her arms. 

“Strip,” she commands, and Tuyet drops her towel and raises an eyebrow. Fiona huffs, but Tuyet thinks she might be smiling around the corner of her mouth. 

It takes the both of them to pull the dress up around Tuyet and to do up the back, tugging on the ribbons until Tuyet can barely catch her breath. “It’s heavy,” she wheezes as Riley carefully attaches a veil of intricate lace to her hair, so it trails behind her and barely curls around her shoulders, going all the way to the ground. 

“Yes,” Fiona says dispassionately, and then takes several steps back, looking her over with a critical eye. Tuyet turns to look at herself in the mirror, and well, she certainly looks like a bride. The bodice is heavily beaded with pearls, and is strapless so her necklace, the altered crown of the late Princess Felicity, is on display. The skirt is pure white silk with what feels like a hundred layers of chiffon underneath, and would be a couple inches too long if not for the towering heels they’d put her in. The veil pulls it all together, the lace veil over the skirt adding dimension to it so it’s not just a field of white. 

She looks beautiful, but the whole thing is heavy and constricting. She couldn’t run in this even if she wanted to, and she wonders if that’s by design. “You did a wonderful job, it’s gorgeous.” 

“It’ll do,” Fiona says, offhand, and Tuyet feels a pang of regret for not acting more excited about the dress, about not loving it more, when Fiona put so much time and effort into it.

“Will you be there?” she asks. 

Riley laughs and Fiona quirks a smile. “Everyone will be there, your highness.” 

What? She means to ask more about that, but then there’s a knock at her door. “Come in!”

Darius opens the door. “It’s nearly time, we have to get going if,” he pauses, staring at her with wide eyes.

She puts a hand on her hip and scowls. “If what?”

“Uh,” he clears his throat, and for some reason Riley is giggling. “If we’re not going to be late, your highness.”

“Well then,” she takes a few steps forward, unsteady in these shoes, and Riley follows behind her to hold up her veil. Darius seems to be biting back laughter at her wobbly progress, but he does hold out his arm for her so she decides not to call him on it. She grips his forearm, making a conscious effort not to put too much strength behind it so she doesn’t hurt him, and stands taller in her ridiculous shoes. “Lead the way.”

After the wedding, after she’s queen, that when the real work begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have to leave to get on a plane in four hours
> 
> i hope you liked it! feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	5. Chapter 5

Tuyet had forgotten that she’d fallen in love with Prince Elias when she’d saved him from the waves, forgotten about the tender-not-maternal feeling she’d had when she looked at his bitten lips and felt the weight of his head on her shoulder. 

Seeing him dressed in a captain’s formal wear, a sword on his hip and a circlet on his head as he waits for her in one of his many sitting rooms, she remembers, suddenly, that once she had not only wanted to possess him, but be possessed in turn. “Steady,” Darius mutters beside her, and she shoots him a glare but he’s not looking at her, instead looking ahead as he guides her to Elias’s side. 

“Princess Tuyet,” Elias greets her, holding out his arm for her to take. “Is everything all right? Are you feeling well?” 

She’s confused by the question until Darius says, “She’s not used to the shoes, your highness.” 

“Ah,” he says, his eyes flicking down, “can’t be helped, I suppose.” 

Now Darius is the one that looks confused, and she wishes she could step on his foot without anyone noticing. Elias knows that she’s a mermaid, that until very recently she’d never walked on two legs never mind in complicated footwear, but no one else does, and she’s planning to keep it that way. “Where is everyone?” she asks, taking Elias’s arm and using that to steady her. “Surely we need witnesses.” 

Elias laughs and Darius walks over to the large glass doors that lead to the balcony. She finally notices a woman dressed in all black with her head covered standing there and wonders if they’re all going to walk to the ceremony together. Darius pulls the doors open and Elias nudges her into walking towards them, and she nearly stumbles at the onslaught of cheers and shouting that come in through the open doors. They walk to the edge of the balcony and gathered in the palace courtyard is what looks like every person on the island, waving flags and cheering, the nobles squished in there with the commoners, everyone elbowing each other in their exuberance. 

“A wedding not witnessed by the people is no wedding,” Elias mutters to her, “Too many secret weddings that were made to the detriment of the country in my ancestry, I suppose.” 

“Oh,” she says, looking over the sea of people, over her people now, all of whom she’s sworn to protect, to take care of, no matter the cost. 

That’s okay. She knows plenty about paying the price. 

The woman in black steps forward and when she speaks the whole swarm of people quiet down but don’t quite fall silent. Even still, her voice rings out clear and loud over everyone, carrying further than Tuyet feels it should, and she can’t help the spike of suspicion. Magic doesn’t exist exclusively beneath the sea after all, but if the extent of this woman’s magic is making her voice like a bell, then that is not magic that is outside the power of a casual practitioner. Or perhaps her magic is well known, and that’s why she’s officiating the wedding ceremony of her prince. 

“Do you take this woman to be your wife?” she asks, and Tuyet abandons her musings to actually pay attention to what’s happening. 

“I do,” Elias says steadily. His voice doesn’t reach in quite the same way that hers does. 

“Do you take this man to be your husband?” she asks. 

It’s a petty use of magic for this, but Tuyet weaves just a bit of that clarity and loudness into her own voice when she answers, “I do.” 

If the woman notices anything different, she doesn’t show it. “Then by the power vested in me by the moon and sea, I pronounce you husband and wife.” 

If she makes any mention of kissing the bride, Tuyet can’t hear it over the cheering of her people, and if she did say it, there’s no time for it anyway. Darius comes forward again, except this time he’s holding a gilded tray, and on it are two crowns, larger and more ornate than anything a prince or princess would wear, with large, heavy jewels crammed into every available space.

Darius lifts the circlet off Elias’s head and replaces it with the king’s crown, then lifts the queen’s crown and gently places it on top of her head. It feels heavy and awkward, but she ignores that and turns with Elias to wave and smile at her people, her eyes straining to find Riley or Fiona in the mass of people, but unable to pick them out from the crowd. 

She meets Elias’s giddy gaze, and together they take their first steps as King Elias and Queen Tuyet. 

~

Feasting lasts long into the night, both outside and inside the castle. Tuyet can’t get drunk unless she chooses to, so she keeps pace with her husband throughout the night and laughs at every raised eyebrow or genuinely surprised comment about her tolerance.

Eventually they’re goaded into leaving the feast and Elias stumbles, knocking into Tuyet, and she would have been able to catch him easily if she wasn’t wearing these ridiculous shoes, but she is wearing them, and resigns herself to falling into an unflattering heap on the floor.

Darius, who’d been standing behind them all night, grabs both her and Elias around the waist, bracing his body against theirs. “Thank you,” she says, reaching up to shove her crown back in place.

He only nods and moves to step away. Tuyet has righted herself, but Elias hasn’t, and sways dangerously on his feet until Darius holds him steady.

“This is ridiculous,” she sighs, reaching down to yank up her dress and kick off her shoes. She picks them up with one hand and holds her dress up above her feet so she doesn’t trip with the other. “Darius, carry him to his room, will you?”

He freezes, conveying very clearly with his face how much he doesn’t want to do that. When she only raises an eyebrow, he glares and says through gritted teeth, “Your majesty, that wouldn’t be appropriate.”

She lifts up her shoes. “Fine. Carry these then, and I’ll carry my husband.”

There’s a roar of laughter from the assembled nobles. The very idea must seem hilarious to them when she’s so slight, but mortal form or not she’s more than strong enough to carry Elias to bed be herself. Darius frowns, like he knows that she really will do it on her own, then says, “Yes, your majesty.”

He hesitates, but when she raises an eyebrow he slowly lifts Elias into a bridal carry. He’s far too drunk to muster any protest, and the equally drunken roar of laughter from her guests is nearly deafening. She nods smartly and goes walking down the hall. Darius walks a half step behind her until they’ve gone up the stairs away from the great hall, then she says, “Finally, hold on,” and pulls off her crown and reaches over to gently lift the crown from Elias’s head. She has no idea how he’s managed to keep it on with all the flailing he’s been doing, but it’s possibly just because his had been adjusted to fit him perfectly while they hadn’t had the time to do that for her. She hopes that’s the case, otherwise she’s going to end up using some of her precious magic just to keep the damn thing on her head. “That went well, right?”

Darius glares.

“Oh, really, you can’t expect us to go on with those silly rules now, can you?” she demands.

He looks pointedly down at Elias. It would be a bit more impressive if he hadn’t already fallen asleep in the time they’d walked from the great hall and curled in towards Darius’s chest like a little kid.

“I’ve already told you I’m getting rid of that silly etiquette rule,” she informs him. “How can I be expected to not speak to anyone around me? Be reasonable.”

He sighs, giving in to her, and defeat is her favorite look on her him. “Queen Tuyet, please. If you need anything from a servant, you should have your ladies ask.”

“My what?” she asks blankly, continuing the walk towards Elias’s rooms now that Darius is speaking to her again.

“A small group of noble women to assist you and support you,” he clarifies. “Given that you don’t have any ties here yet, you should be careful about who you choose. I would talk to the king and get his opinion first.”

She does her best not to make a face. That just sounds like a bunch of women who will get her way. “Fine. I’ll pick Riley then.”

“Noble ladies,” he repeats, “Riley is a seamstress’s daughter.”

Oh, damn. It’s so hard to remember this. In the ocean, only the royal family was strong enough to go so deep in the ocean as to reach the palace, so all her servants were also her cousins. It meant that even though they served her meals and brushed her hair, the disparity between them wasn’t that great. They were her family, after all, and even though she was a princess they were all of royal blood. But things are different here, not every occupant of the palace is her equal, but it’s hard to keep that in mind. Outside of the castle she was a representation of her father, so there was only so much mischief she could get into, and absolutely no cruelty, even if she had considered herself so far above her subjects that such a thing had seemed acceptable to her, and the rest of the time she was in the castle with people who were nearly her equal in both power and blood. But that’s not how it works in the world of mortals, class matters here in a way it doesn’t back home, and even if she can adjust to it, she doesn’t know if she wants to. “Well, that’s ridiculous. Any noble women who can fight?”

He nearly trips, which is more concerning than normal because he’s carrying her husband. “Are you planning to get into a lot of fights, your majesty?”

Of course. That’s what Elias has bought with his kiss, with his kingdom. “Perhaps. Well?”

He doesn’t say anything until they’re nearly at Elias’s door, then, “I’ll ask around,” before going back to being stoic and ridiculous once they approach the guards stationed outside of Elias’s room.

The guards’ faces remain stoic even without the ridiculous picture they must make, but they only bow their heads and pull the door open for them, then close it once they make their way inside. Darius gently lays Elias on his bed, then looks kind of helpless with what to do with himself. “Walk me back to my rooms?” she asks, if only to give him something to do.

He blinks. “To your – aren’t you going to stay here?”

What. “What?”

“With the king – to, uh,” he blushes, “consummate your marriage.”

Oh.

Right.

She’d forgotten about that.

She clears her throat and gestures to the bed. “Does he look like he’s consummating anything tonight?”

Darius grimaces. “No, but, your majesty, it’ll look bad if you don’t spend the night together.”

“I suppose I can sleep here,” she says, taking a better look around the room now that she’s just not dropping off her husband. It’s clean and orderly except for the literal towers of books and sheathes of scrolls that have grown past the point of being able to fit on his large ornate desk, so now they’re spilling onto the floor. “Not in this dress, though.”

He laughs then says, “Goodnight, Queen Tuyet.”

“Goodnight,” she says. She marches over to her husband’s closet and it only takes her half a second to pull out a long tunic that’ll be perfect for her to sleep in. It seems like a great idea until she tries to wriggle out of her dress and can’t get it to budge an inch. She looks over her shoulder and sees Darius with the door open, about to leave. “Wait, Darius! Help me out of this dress!”

He stops leaving, which is good, but he’s not coming back into the room either, which is less good. 

“Darius!” she repeats, feeling a flash of irritation that she viciously pushes back down. She’s his queen, she shouldn’t need to repeat herself. 

His shoulders hunch to his ears, but he takes a step back and slowly slides the door shut. His face is flushed a bright red when he turns around. “Your majesty. Was that really necessary?” 

“It’s not like I can sleep in this,” she says in what she considers a reasonable tone of voice, then turns around. “How does this come undone anyway?” 

He still doesn’t move, and she’s about to snap at him again when he sighs and comes closer, his fingers brushing against the back of her neck as he starts to undo the many buttons down her back. Cetus slithers across the prince’s vanity, now a silvery cobra, and curls into a pile by the water pitcher. She’d left him in her room this morning, but she’s not surprised that he didn’t stay there. Darius pauses, but doesn’t say anything about it, as if it’s perfectly normal thing for a queen to have in her husband’s quarters. Maybe it is. What does she know about being a human queen anyway, maybe they all have snakes that adorn their vanities. The dress finally comes undone, sliding down to her hips, and Darius presses a hand into the back of her corset. “You can get out of this yourself, right?” She looks over her shoulder to glare at him. He nods, avoiding her gaze. “Right. Okay.” 

“It’s just clothes,” she says, forcing her words to come out slow and patient. “Aren’t you supposed to be guarding my body anyway?” 

“Something like that,” he says, and she rolls her eyes, but he pulls and yanks at the long strings along her back until it comes loose and she can finally breathe properly again, expanding her ribs to take in a greedy lungful of air. 

She undoes the clasps in the front so the corset slides off of her and she shimmies out of the rest of her dress, pushing it down and away from here. When she turns around, Darius is both looking up at the ceiling and has a hand over his eyes. It’d be cute if it wasn’t ridiculous. She rolls her eyes and pulls Elias’s tunic over her head. “You can look now.” 

He peeks at her from behind his fingers and shuts them again. “I really shouldn’t see you like this, your majesty.” 

It’ll put a real damper on her wedding if she beats up her bodyguard for getting on her nerves. “Thank you for your help, Darius. You’re dismissed.” 

“Thank you, Queen Tuyet,” he responds, and she thinks she’s a little insulted at how relieved he sounds. 

But he also walks into the wall on his way out since he refused to open his eyes, and instead she’s laughing as he opens the door and slips outside. 

The door closes behind him, and then it’s just her and Elias and the quiet of the room. She sits at the vanity and Cetus lazily closes his eyes. This part she can do herself, after all. She wipes off the khol edging her eyes and pulls the hair sticks out so she can unwind her hair from the bun Riley had put it in, feeling the beginnings of a headache now that she’s not so focused on the tension of having her skin pulled away from her face. Elias doesn’t have a brush on his vanity, so she runs her fingers through her hair, smoothing out the few knots that had managed to sneak in there since this morning. 

Finally there’s nothing else to do but go to bed. 

She walks over, looking down at her sleeping husband, and it occurs to her that he probably doesn’t want to sleep in his dress clothes either, the heavy embroidered jacket or any of the rest of it. She pulls off his shoes first, then his jacket, tugging him upright to get it off properly, slowly peeling away the layers of his station until he’s in his underwear and undertunic, and he almost comes awake through it several times, mumbling and his eyes barely opening before falling shut again. She pulls the blankets down, lifting him up enough to tug it out from underneath him, and then gets in bed, pulling it back up around the both of them. The bed’s more than big enough for two people, she could have invited Darius to spend the night as well and there would still be room to spare, so she expects that she’ll barely notice he’s there. 

She’s curled away from him, just about to fall asleep, when his arm throws itself over her waist, and she’s wide awake. He knows she’s a sea witch, surely he wouldn’t be so stupid as to - 

“Hey,” he says, in what he seems to think is a whisper but definitely isn’t, “hey! We - you’re - my kingdom is yours, now.” 

“Yes,” she says, not shifting to look at him but also not doing anything to stop him from shuffling close enough to hook his chin over her shoulder. 

“You’re going to save it, aren’t you?” he asks, “You promised. If I gave it to you, you’d keep it safe.” 

“Yes,” she agrees, uncomfortable with this conversation and not sure why, “I will. You paid the price.” 

“Right,” he agrees, quieter. Then, “Is it - tonight? Are you going to do it tonight?” 

As if extricating his kingdom from this mess of a war is as easy as snapping her fingers? But he’s drunk and hopeless and so very warm along her back so she’s not going to call him on it. “Not tonight, no.” 

“Oh.” He quiets for a moment. “Okay then.” 

She means to question him more, but he buries his face in her hair and then starts snoring softly in her ear. She shifts his head so it’s not quite so close to hers, but his grip is so firm around her waist that she’d have to wake him up to move it, and it’s not like it’s uncomfortable or anything. So instead she closes her eyes, listens to oceans waves outside of her window, and drifts off to sleep. 

~

If Elias is surprised to find her in his bed the next morning, he doesn’t act like it, slowly opening his eyes and smiling at her when he catches her staring at him instead of giving her a hard time about it like she half expected him to.

“Right,” she says, rolling out of bed and onto her feet. “Show me your navy.”

He pushes himself upright and rubs his eyes. “Can we eat breakfast first?”

“You are a king,” she answers, “I’m sure you can walk and eat at the same time.”

His pulls himself out of bed and his shirt hits the floor as he rifles through his closet, and she appreciates the view of his bare, muscular back. “Fine. But we should at least get dressed.”

He’s giving two shirts of nearly identical color far too much consideration for her peace of mind. She hasn’t seen him show a proclivity towards vanity before this, but then again the time she’s spent with him can more easily be measured in hours than days. She puts her arm near the floor so Cetus can wrap himself around her wrist, once again small enough so that he appears to be nothing more than a bracelet to the untrained eye. “If you’re not dressed when I’m back I’ll drag you half naked in front of all of your subjects.”

“Our subjects,” he corrects, and she feels a surge of warmth up her spine. “It’s the first time they’ll see me as a king when I’m not dressed for my wedding.”

She doesn’t see why they would care what their king is wearing as long he isn’t traipsing about in rags, but she’s hardly the expert on human social mores, so she just says, “That doesn’t change anything,” and opens her door to go to her own room. “Darius,” she says in surprise, closing the door. “What are you doing out here?”

Two guards, different than the ones that had been their last night, are standing outside of Elias’s door, but now Darius is there too, just silently standing there like the others. He doesn’t alter his face in any way, but she gets the message clear enough and says, “Okay, come with me and stand outside of my door while I get dressed, then Elias and I are going to the shipyard.”

He does what she says without her having to ask him twice, which would make a nice change, except the moment they were out of earshot he said, “You really shouldn’t roam the halls without clothes on.”

“I am wearing clothes,” she says, tugging on the end of her borrowed tunic. “Also why are these halls always so empty? And why are the king and queen’s quarters so far apart from one another? Walking to another wing of the castle every time I want to see my husband doesn’t seem very sustainable.”

“Servants are meant to be neither seen nor heard,” he says, which is still an annoying and useless rule. It also seems improbable. Do the servants have their own passageways and doors, perhaps? “His majesty is currently in the rooms for the royal heirs, while he moved you into the queen’s suite upon your arrival. The king’s quarters are across the hall from yours. His belongings will be moved, and his old rooms cleaned and locked up until you have a need for them.”

It takes Tuyet a moment to realize that Darius is referring to whatever children she and Elias would have, and she squashes the idea before she can even start to fantasize. Even if they were sharing a bed, colloquially speaking, she’s going to be gone long before she could produce any heirs. Not that she’d want her children in separate wing of the castle from her anyway. “Oh. Okay. Are you going to wait outside my door or do you want to undress me again?”

It takes him a second of staring at her with a slack jaw to realize that’s she’s teasing him. “Your majesty,” he says disapprovingly, “that’s not very nice.”

“I never said I was nice,” she says cheerfully before closing the door in his face.

She really wishes she could take a bath, could soak herself in some warm water and doze in the sunlight that comes in from her window, but as lovely as it that sounds, she has work to do. So she gives herself a quick, perfunctory scrub with a washcloth just to make herself presentable and pulls her hair into a quick bun that’s not quite as perfect as the one Riley had done for her yesterday.

She puts on one of the dresses she’d altered yesterday. The top is firm but not constricting, and the skirt has slits all the way to the top of her thigh. She pulls on a thin pair of leggings, then flat leather boots on top of that. It’s still beautiful, but she can also run in it, and fight in it. Legs are new and confusing enough all on their own without adding extra constrictions on top it. The bodice is mostly the same, just without some of the bunched up stitching in the shoulders that impeded her movement.

There’s a knock on the door and she pulls it open to find Elias on the other side wearing a perfectly matching blue velvet outfit, his king’s crown on top of his head. He has her crown in his hands. “Hello Tuyet,” he says, but he’s not looking at her face, instead focusing on her outfit, on all the ways she’s altered his dead mother’s clothes. For a moment she thinks she’s made a mistake, that maybe she should have just wasted the energy to summon some new clothes up, or beg some discarded dresses from Fiona to work with instead. But then he smiles, and she thinks it’s even relieved. “You forgot your crown.”

She pulls a face, taking it from his hands. “Is there someone we can have fix this? It doesn’t fit quite right.” It would be so, so much easier for her to do it herself, but she reminds herself yet again that it would be smarter to save her power for things she really needs it for, and not for things like making sure her crown fits properly. 

“Yes,” he says, “Come on.” 

Darius and a guard she doesn’t recognize follow them down to the bowels of the castle and Tuyet does her best to ignore all the stares following her throughout the castle. She’s new, and their queen, and that’s more than interesting enough to ensure their gazes stay on her for a long time, so she better get used to it. Elias introduces her to a bug eyed woman with unruly silver hair named Priya who takes the crown and says, “Yes, of course, look at you, it just won’t do,” and yanks open a cabinet filled with priceless jewels and shoves the crown in it like it’s a spare dish and then pulls open several drawers equally filled with glittering diamonds and rubies before emerging triumphantly with a silver crown with sloping peaks and no giant jewels, instead encrusted with bunches of extremely small diamonds. 

“I don’t know if that’s appropriate for her status,” Elias starts. 

Tuyet waves a hand, cutting him off, and steps closer. There’s only candlelight down here, but it seems like the crown is shining even with just that. “It’s lovely.” 

Priya smiles at her and lifts the crown up, waiting for Tuyet to bend down enough to settle it on her head. Unlike the other one, it fits perfectly, the silver quickly warming against her skin, and so light she barely feels it. 

“I was hoping you could do something about the fit of the other one,” Elias says. 

Priya shakes her head. Whatever concerns about offending royalty everyone else in this castle has, she doesn’t seem to share them. “This one is better. Is there anything else, your majesties?” 

“No,” Tuyet says, threading her arm with Elias’s before he can disagree, “Thank you” 

Priya offers them an absent-minded bow and then gets back to work, sitting at a table scattered with emeralds and lifting a magnifying glass to her eye, acting as if they’re not longer right in front of her.

Elias is frowning, but Tuyet tugs him away. “The shipyard,” she reminds him, because she did come here for a reason. 

“Right,” he says, “Why do you want to go?” 

“To see the state of them, of course,” she says, “We’re at war. How many ships do we have? How many men and women to run them? How are our weapons supply? Are they battleships that can make it through a few skirmishes, or merchant ships hastily outfitted for their task with little chance of return? I assume someone’s being keep track of the attacks, including their frequency and severity.” 

Elias looks startled, as do their guards, although she assumes not for the same reasons. Darius and the other guard are startled because they expected her to be little more than a bride, and Elias because he probably didn’t expect her to win this war tactically. But she has no other choice. She can’t win this war with a spell, she doesn’t have that type of magic. She can summon a storm to shipwreck any oncoming attack, but if they don’t fight the root cause, if they don’t make a strong show of military force, it won’t matter how many ships she sinks. She can’t stay forever, so she needs this nation to be strong enough all on its own not to need miracles from sea witches. Especially because the next one they summon likely isn’t going to be as nice as she is. 

“About three hundred ships,” he answers, “and a mix of the above. Our navy stands at a little over twenty thousand fighting ready members, and about that many for support, the cooks and such. They have combat training too, but I wouldn’t count on them lasting long in a fight.” 

Not the largest, from what she’s seen swimming along the coasts, but not nothing either. It should be enough against pirate attacks, even if it seems like every pirate in the area has decided to hold a grudge against an island they hadn’t seemed to care about before now. Knowing why all this was happening might make it easier figuring out how to stop it, but it’s not like she can grab a pirate and ask them. 

Well. Actually.

She could, probably, it’s not like finding pirates in the ocean is particularly difficult and using magic in her natural form is much easier than when she’s trying to maintain a human shape. Truth spells come cheap, are one of the few services she offers as a sea witch that don’t require something terrible to complete, and there’s no reason she can’t use it on a couple of pirates.

“Tuyet?” Elias prods when she stays silent.

She answers even as she half focuses on her plan to slip out to the sea tonight and find someone useful. “And how many of these have been provided by your allies?”

“None,” he answers, and her answering glare is sharp enough that Elias’s guard takes a half step back before remembering his duty and hurrying to catch up. Elias doesn’t notice and Tuyet isn’t about to point it out, but Darius does shoot him a disapproving look. “My parents hadn’t requested any, and then after I wasn’t king, and our treaties all state that the they’re only valid between monarchs, not countries.”

Tuyet doesn’t want to embarrass him in front of his subjects, not when he’s going to need to continue ruling them after she returns to the sea, so she just nods and doesn’t point out that if they were really interested in honoring their treaty, that if they ever planned to help them, they wouldn’t have let the letter of their agreement get in the way of the spirit of it.

But there’ll be time for that later, and she’s sure it’s nothing his advisors don’t already know, so for now she lets Elias lead her through the shipyard and introduce her to every captain they come across.

Tonight she’s going to find out exactly what’s going on with her island.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it! feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	6. Chapter 6

On one hand, it seems ridiculous to Tuyet that people who are supposed to spend the rest of their lives together live separately, even if it’s just across the hall from one another. Although she supposes that political marriages are rather more of a concern when one does not rule their domain through something measurable, like magical power. The human world has so many monarchs, but the sea only has one. Kings and queens of the sea don’t marry people they dislike.

On the other hand, it’s rather to her benefit at the moment that her husband isn’t here to question her.

She’s wearing the same dress as this morning, even though dinner was hours ago and the moon is high in the sky. It seems pointless to dirty another set of clothes, considering she’ll have to stash her clothes by the shore and just hope they’re still there when she comes back. She has to go investigating, she has to figure out who’s doing this, and the easiest way to do that is to go find a pirate and magic the truth out of them, and the easiest way to do _that_ is to return to her mermaid form for the night.

Her current problem is how, precisely, she’s supposed to get to the sea. Guards are outside her room, and it’s not to keep her in, precisely, but they’ll certainly notice if she walks by them, and then someone might wonder what she’s doing disappearing in the middle of the night, which will only lead to questions that she’s not interested in answering. She opens her window, stepping onto the ledge to stare out into the horizon. It’s a shame she’s so high up. Then again, she’s certainly strong enough to scale the wall. The only downside is that it’ll take a while and if anyone happens to look out their window it will look very strange. Which is more concerning to humans? A queen who scales castle walls or one who disappears naked in the middle of the night only to return in the morning like nothing had happened? Something tells her that neither will be particularly well received.

“Your majesty, don’t do it!”

She blinks and looks behind her, but no one’s there.

“It’s not worth it! Please!”

Tuyet glances down. Two stories below her is a noblewoman standing on her balcony in a nightgown clutching a handkerchief with wide, watery eyes. “Okay,” she says, because the woman seems rather upset by something. “What don’t you want me to do?”

“Don’t jump,” she says tearfully. “I know this land must be strange to you, and that King Elias is strange, but truly – not again, he’s already had one bride jump to her death!” Princess Felicity’s crown that she wears around her neck suddenly feels like a noose, but she ignores it. “He can’t handle another one. Please don’t do it.”

“I’m not,” she starts, then cuts herself off and sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Just, hold on. Don’t move.”

She turns around, grabs the bottom edge of the windowsill and let’s her feet drop so she’s dangling over the edge.

The woman screams.

“Please be quiet,” Tuyet says, trying not to sound cross. It’s easier than she thought it’d be. She’s mostly exasperated. She lets go, dropping down and landing onto the balcony next the woman. If she were human, she probably would have at least broken an ankle, but she’s not. The woman has covered her mouth with her hands, which Tuyet appreciates. “Thank you.”

She slowly lowers her hands. “Your – your majesty. If I may ask, um, what – why – if you, actually, what I mean is. What are you doing?”

That first bit is rather confusing, but the second part is easy enough. “I’m not jumping. I just want to go for a walk.”

“And you couldn’t use your door?” she asks, voice carefully, perfectly polite in a way that makes it clear she thinks Tuyet is mad and she would dearly like to tell her so.

“I wanted to take a walk alone,” she says. “There are guards outside my door. I was trying to see if I could sneak out the window. I didn’t mean to startle you.” She holds out her hand. “You obviously know who I am, but I don’t think we’ve met. Or we have and I forgot. Sorry.”

“We haven’t met,” she says, going into a deep curtsey. Tuyet awkwardly lowers her hand. “I am Lady Isobel. You know my brother, I believe.”

Tuyet can’t remember the names of literally any of the lords she’s met. There are so many of them and they all wear the same blue and white clothes. At least the ladies have different looking dresses. “I’m sorry, who’s your brother?”

Isobel’s eyebrows dip together, and great, she’s managed to offend her. She wishes she could move the naval captains into the palace, she’d gotten along fine with all of them. “Darius, your majesty.”

“Just call me Tuyet,” she says. “Darius is your brother?” She pauses, not wanting to say the wrong thing, but still confused. “Are the guards nobility here?” If they are, then this whole no talking business is even more ridiculous than she’d thought.

“They are not.” Isobel lowers her eyes. “He is my father’s son, but not my mothers. I apologize, it isn’t proper to refer to him as my brother.”

This place is going to drive her mad, and then her peoples’ perception of her and reality will mesh quite well. “Why? You share a father, therefor you are siblings. I hardly see how you could be anything else. So is it your mother who is a noble and your father a commoner, which is why you are a lady and he is not a lord?”

Isobel stares at her a moment then shakes her head. “Your majesty, both my parents are from noble lines. But my parents are married. Darius's mother was a cook. My father did not marry her.”

“Right,” she says, pretending this makes sense to her. “And does his parents not being married make him less his father’s son?”

Isobel looks at her carefully for a moment, then says, “Yes.”

This whole place is insane.

“Right,” she says. “Okay. Well, I like your brother a lot, he’s very helpful and even listens to me sometimes, which is very nice. Do you have a guard outside your room? Could I leave through there? Or I suppose I could just try balcony jumping,” she muses, leaning over to see where the next closest balcony is.

Isobel grabs her arm and yanks her back. “Your majesty!” Tuyet blinks, looking at the hand curved around her forearm. Isobel drops her arm and takes several steps back, going into a deep bow. “Your majesty, I’m so sorry, please forgive me!”

“Okay,” she says. Isobel twitches, almost lifting her head but then keeping it turned down. “It’s not a big deal. And I told you to call me Tuyet, this your majesty business is too much of a mouthful. Can I use your door? Unless there are guards outside of it, and then maybe your window.”

“I am not highly ranked enough to have a guard,” she says, slowly peeking up at Tuyet, who tries to smile encouragingly at her. “Your majesty is of course welcome to use my door if that’s what she wishes.”

Oh, great, this is way better than the scaling the side of the castle. “Thank you,” she says, touching her shoulder as she walks by.

Isobel calls out, “You_ are_ just going for a walk, your majesty?” Tuyet pauses, turning to look back at her. Isobel has her arms wrapped around her herself, and she does a poor job of forcing her lips into a smile. “It’s only that, if you were to leave and not come back, I don’t think our king would recover.” Then, quieter still, “Or my brother.”

She’s only been here a couple days, she’s sure they’d manage. Surely a widowed king is still a king. She doesn’t say any of that, instead promising, “I’m coming back.” Isobel nods, not looking entirely convinced, but Tuyet can’t waste any more time trying to convince her.

The hallways are emptier down here, and it’s much easier to sneak outside than from her own bedroom. She nearly forgets about the guards outside of the castle and gets caught then. Going around the back adds time to her route, but it’s probably easier in the end than trying to get past the guards unseen. She’ll have to use another night sometime soon to go her cave and grab some of her spell scrolls. There’s some sort of invisibility potion in there, she’s just never paid any attention to it because she never thought she’d need it. Or maybe she’ll just ask Cetus to go retrieve it for her. Surely he can read, he’s thousands of years old.

Well. It’s likely he can read, but whether he can read her language is another issue entirely.

She makes it to the shore without getting caught and she pokes around the beach until she finds a couple of rocks twice as tall as she is. She strips, folding her clothes and placing them alongside her boots on the sand. She’s high enough that she shouldn’t have to worry about them being lost to the rising tide. Or well, she shouldn’t have to worry about it as long as she’s back before morning, which she will be. She’s not sure how long Elias could keep her disappearance a secret, and she’d hate to make Isobel worry.

She runs across the sand, her calves burning, and can’t help smiling as she dives beneath the waves. She lets go of the spell forcing her into a human shape, her legs twisting and melting together to form her tail.

It’s only been a few days, but she’s missed this. It’s probably a mistake. Applying and reapplying the spell to give her legs takes more of her limited control than it’s worth, it’s a net loss on her available magic and really, she shouldn’t risk doing this again, at least not if she’s just using her own magic and not some sort of sacrifice to make the transformation smoother. Or, well, she supposes she could use her trident, but magics to do with loss usually take too much from direction tools to be worth the efforts. It’s easy for her to summon her trident back into her hand, pulling from the place that is both here and not-here, but then she has a second problem.

Tracking and traveling spells are easy enough, all on their own but especially with the trident. What she has to decide is who she’s tracking.

She knows the name of plenty of pirates. She could pick any of them, and surely they’d all know the answers to her questions, and it doesn’t matter if they’d tell her willingly or not, because she has ways to work around that. All she needs is the name. It could be anyone.

But she does have a couple pirates she’s met personally. Ones who are smart and strong, ones who are already legends in their own right, ones who haven’t attacked her island, so she won’t even have a reason to kill them after.

She’s not naïve enough to believe she’ll be able to win this war for her people and for Elias without getting her hands dirty. She hasn’t worried about that kind of stain for a long time, not since Caligula died and Tuyet rook her place and started doing things far worse than killing. But it’s a nice thought, that she wouldn’t have to start that way, that she could go looking for – well, not a friend, exactly, but not a foe either.

Her trident is glowing in her hand, and there’s still some doubts in the back of her mind, good reasons not to do this, but she ignores them and says, “Captain John Darling.”

There’s a tug in her navel, pulling her into the direction he’s in, and it’s not too late, she can cancel the spell and go find a pirate she can torture without feeling bad about it. Instead she layers the transportation spell on top of the tracking one and lets it pull her to where she needs to be.

She’d expected it the spell to spit her out somewhere near the shore, thought that if she was lucky they would have settled on a coastal town, because surely after being attacked by Caligula, more than once from the sounds of it, they would have left the sea behind.

Instead her spell takes her to the middle of the ocean, south of where’d she’d come from judging by her tropical surroundings. It’s the same ship with the same crew as last time, and Captain John Darling is on the deck, shouting out orders with a baby on his hip.

She uses the same spell she’d used before to make the water raise her onto the ship, except this time she has the control to stop it from simply throwing her onboard like a flapping fish. The crew shouts and scrambles back, and Tuyet is watching John, so she sees the moment he hears the screaming and sees the moving water out of the corner of his eye. He pulls a gun from his hip, the same as last time, but by the time he’s aimed it at her his face has already lightened in recognition.

The water settles her so she’s sitting upright on one of the chests onboard, her tail trailing onto the floor. She uses her trident to balance herself so she doesn’t tip over onto the deck. “You’re alive,” John says, pocketing the gun. “I’d hoped you were.”

She smiles without meaning to and can’t bring herself to regret it. “Hello Captain Darling.”

“Please, call me John,” he says, just as there’s a bang of the door to the lower deck being shoved open. Ana and Maria tumble out half dressed with swords in their hand, obviously attracted by the screams of the crew. They look confused to find themselves not under attack from an enemy vessel, but that confusion leaves when their eyes land on her. They raise their swords and unison. Ana still manages to be remarkable intimidating for a woman who isn’t wearing pants. “You remember my wives, I presume?”

“Darling,” Maria says through gritted teeth. “What’s going on?”

He shrugs. The baby in his arms starts chewing on the edge of his jacket. “I have no idea. It appears we have a guest.”

“A guest,” Ana says flatly.

John glances at Tuyet and then gives a firm nod. “Yes, it does appear that way.” He gestures to his terrified crew that are busy pressing themselves against the edges of the ship, getting as far away from her as they can without jumping into the water. “Perhaps it would be better if we continued this conversation in our quarters? It seems as if she’s making some people uncomfortable.”

Tuyet doesn’t particularly care where they speak, but. “If I use the ocean to move myself to your room, I’m going to flood it.” It’s not a threat, she just can’t stop the water from being wet. Well, she could, but it would be far more effort than it’s worth.

“Not a problem. Ana can carry you,” he says.

Ana rolls her eyes, “Oh, can I?”

“Regretfully,” John says, not sounding regretful at all, “my hands are full.”

“Oh, you sure are full of something,” Ana says, but she’s already walking towards Tuyet. “Do you mind?”

Tuyet shakes her head but warns, “The tail is heavier than it looks.” She could cast a spell to make herself lighter, but, once again, she’s really trying to conserve magic. At the point where she’s casting weight altering charms, she might as well cast a levitation spell on herself and save everyone the trouble.

Ana just rolls her eyes. Tuyet resigns herself to crashing to the ground in an undignified heap, but Ana puts one arm around her back, the other at the natural bend of her tail, and lifts her up, tipping her against her chest to help distribute her weight but holding her up just the same.

“Get back to work,” Ana barks at the crew, then heads towards the hatch. Maria holds the door open for her, and Tuyet can’t help but be nervous about all the stairs, even though she knows it’s not going to be stairs that kill her, but Ana carries her without complaint all the way to the captain’s quarters, settling her carefully in an ornate chair across from a dark, imposing desk. The whole thing would probably be a lot more intimidating if it weren’t for the pink and frilly bassinet in the corner of the room.

John follows behind them, bumping the door closed with his hip. “I heard Caligula is dead.”

“I didn’t kill her,” she says. “I didn’t come here to talk about Caligula.”

“Well, I did,” he says, sitting on the edge of his desk rather than behind it. Maria comes forward to take her baby – her and John’s daughter, it seems – and then goes back to standing next to Ana. Maria holding a baby, much like Ana without pants, still manages to convey her complete willingness to commit murder and her lack of remorse in doing so. “If you didn’t kill her then how can you be sure she’s dead? Who killed her?”

She considers not answering, considers casting her truth spell and leaving. But Ana had gone to the effort of carrying her down here, and there’s a good chance she’d be dead if John hadn’t stepped up and defended her against Caligula when they’d met before. She doesn’t think she has a bad relationship with these humans, and she can’t think of a good enough reason to change that. “I saw her corpse. I turned it into sea foam myself.” Then, partly just to see how he’ll react she adds, “No one sang for her.”

John smiles, something satisfied in the lines around his mouth. “Good.” Then, “So you’ve taken her place then? I’d heard there was still someone to make deals with, if one is so inclined.”

“I have,” she says.

“Are you here to collect her debt?” Ana asks even as Maria holds the baby even closer to her chest.

Tuyet still hasn’t decided if she’s going to go for offended or reassuring when John says, “No, she’s not. Look at her trident. She has no need to cultivate the magic of potential.”

“Its magic isn’t infinite,” she says, but he’s mostly right. Her limits are not that of potential but control. Between her own natural magic and the magic she’s poured into the trident, she’s flush with it. Instead her problem is her strength, the thing Caligula had been so concerned with. She can only use so much of her magic before it rebounds and hurts her, until she loses control of it. Maintaining her human form isn’t sustainable, not without a human heart, and since she’s not planning to take one, it’s only her own power and control that can keep her on land. Every spell she casts and bit of magic she uses takes that much more effort and taxes what she’s capable of handling. The more magic she uses, the sooner she burns through the limits of the spells that allow her to walk on land.

John raises an eyebrow, as if he doesn’t quite believe her, but she’s not going to bother explaining it to him. Telling him that her only limitations are her morals and her strength, not her power, doesn’t seem like a good move from any angle. But he surprises her and says, “You’ll gain more control the more you use it. Don’t let your lack of it worry you too much.”

“Who are you? You know too much,” she snaps, taken aback.

“Is that what you came all the way out here to ask me? Who am I?” He spreads his hands in front of him. “I’m Captain John Darling.”

“What are you, then,” she corrects coldly, starting to think that maybe this was all a mistake, that extracting information out of a random pirate was obviously the correct thing to do and she’s just messed this all up.

He glances at his wives, sighs, and reaches up his hands to unbutton his shirt.

“John!” Ana shouts, stepping in between them, “What are you doing? Haven’t you learned your lesson with Caligula?”

“Haven’t you?” he asks, not unkindly, but her shoulders hunch anyway. “Darling, please.”

Ana stays between them, spine taut, and then lets out a harsh breath and takes several steps back. John finishes unbuttoning the top of his shirt and pulls it open.

Down his sternum is a thick, pale scar.

“It’s a terrible thing,” he says softly, “to be loved so much, but not enough, and in the end for that love to remain only as scar tissue.”

It’s not impossible, but it is improbable. Yet it’s staring her in the face. “You’re – you’re like me?”

He laughs and shakes his head. “Not really.” He pushes himself to standing then bows to her, neatly bending himself in half. “Pleased to meet you formally, Princess. I was but a simple merman and had none of the power you wield as a member of the royal family.”

“You know who I am?” she asks faintly. Ana and Maria are staring at her, like they’re trying to figure out what about her marks her as royalty and are coming up blank.

He rights himself and goes back to leaning against his desk. “Not exactly, no. You’re one of King Proteus’s daughters, I assume, but I haven’t been able to keep abreast of court gossip so I couldn’t say which. I wouldn’t worry too much about anyone else figuring it out, I met you before you’d taken on the moniker of witch. Only a royal could have the power you had then, and only a member of the main family could tame the trident of one such as Caligula.”

She almost doesn’t say anything. She should run now, because he knows her, he could find a way to tell someone in the sea about her, and the tenuous existence she’s managed to scrape together from the ashes of who she used to be will be torn apart. Her father will lock her up forever, if not outright kill her for the things she’s done. “I could wipe your memory,” she says. It would be a large toll on her, the spell complicated enough that it will surely shorten the time she’ll manage to spend on land. But for her continued safety, it’d be worth it, wouldn’t it?

Ana and Maria tense, but John doesn’t seem as concerned. “You could,” he agrees. “So you might as well tell me why you’re really here. It’s not like you have anything to lose, since you can just erase our memories after, if that’s what you choose to do.”

It’s an entirely reasonable thing to say. She finds she’s irritated by it anyway. “Finish telling me about yourself first. Both of your wives are here. They clearly have their hearts. What happened to you?” The spell to consume and take in the heart of human who loves the recipient shouldn’t leave a scar.

“It was a long time ago,” he says dismissively. She only raises an eyebrow. He sighs. “This is quite unfair, Princess. You can force us to forget your secrets, but my secrets once yours are yours forever.” She crosses her arms. He relents, but she gets the impression he’s laughing at her a little. “I loved a man. His name was Diego. He was very beautiful and very poor, and I was very stupid, so I went to Caligula and made a bargain with her. In exchange for my heart, I would have a season to make Diego fall in love with me. She said that if Diego gave me his heart, I would have no need for my own. If he didn’t, giving my heart to her would kill me.” He smiles, something self-depreciating about it, “I thought she was speaking metaphorically. She wasn’t, of course. When I found out, I resigned myself to death. I loved Diego, so of course I couldn’t kill him. But when he found out, he – he tried to find another way, and it didn’t work.”

Oh. Context helps, a little. “He tried to give you someone else’s heart. Someone who didn’t love you.” That would explain the scar, at least.

“I never found out who he killed,” he says, almost more to himself than to her. “I suppose it didn’t matter. He thought my life was worth more than someone else’s. He just didn’t think it was worth his own.”

“But you’re here,” she says slowly, almost wishing she had legs so she could go over and prod him a little bit, so she could listen to his murdered heart and see what rhythm it beat to. “It didn’t kill you?” She would have thought that it would kill him, not save him from Caligula.

He snorts. “Clearly not. But it’s hasn’t exactly left me unscathed.” She gets the impression that he’s not just talking about the scar on his chest. “So, Princess, what can I do for you?”

“What’s wrong with you?” she asks. This isn’t why she came here, but she’s here now, and he’s one of her people, someone who was hurt by Caligula the same way that Caligula tried to hurt her, who’d lost not only a heart but a child to her clutches. “If I can help you, I will.”

Maria looks her up and down with a sneer. “Why? What’s the price?”

“I am Princess Tuyet of the sea, daughter of King Proteus,” she says, talking to Maria even as she looks at John. “You are one of mine. I’ll help you if I can.”

John is looking at her, but Tuyet can’t quite read the look on his face. “You’re also a sea witch.” Then, softer, “I hadn’t thought you were the youngest princess.”

“Tell me what’s wrong with you,” she says. “If I wanted to hurt you, I’d just do it, and I haven’t, so I don’t.”

John is still just looking at her and not speaking. Maybe she will end up using a truth spell, except it’ll be both to get the truth of what’s attacking island and what’s wrong with John Darling.

“He can’t stay long on land,” Ana says. Both Maria and John turn to her, Maria in anger and John in surprise, but neither of them try and stop her. “His heart starts beating too fast and too erratically if he’s away from water for too long. It would kill him. Why do you think we’re on this ship, even after knowing Caligula was after us? We can’t settle on a coastal town because they all know us, and we can’t settle inland because it would kill him. He doesn’t age right, he talks about all of this like it was a decade ago, but it’s been nearly a century. Sometimes his lungs forget to work, and sometimes for minutes at a time I’ll just have to watch him suffocate with his head above water. He lost his cold sea heart, but the human one didn’t quite take, so he’s both and not quite either and one day it’s going to kill him. Can you fix that?”

The last bit is said with a desperation that’s part challenge and part plea.

“You know,” Tuyet says slowly, “I think I could. I have this problem I need to deal with first, one I’m thinking you could help with, but I know of one coastal town you could move to while I figure it out. I’ll help you even if you don’t help me, but the sooner I fix this mess, the sooner I can fix you.”

“They know us everywhere,” Maria says.

“Oh, you wouldn’t have to hide,” she says, “just the opposite, in fact. Pirates are attacking my island and I want you tell me why, and then I want you to help me stop them.” They only look more confused. She’s going to have to take the long way home with them anyway, so she casts the transformation spell and the trident heats in her hand as her tail splits into two and she daintily crosses one leg over the other. Ana and Maria take several steps back in alarm, but John’s only reaction is to look genuinely surprised for the first time. “I am not only Princess Tuyet of the sea, daughter of King Proteus. I am also Queen Tuyet, wife of King Elias, and I want your help.”

There’s a human expression about fighting fire with fire.

She’s going to fight pirates with pirates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it! 
> 
> feel free to follow/harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	7. Chapter 7

Ana and Maria lend her clothes, since it’s not exactly practical for her to walk around the ship naked.

Tuyet loves them.

Tight, thick dark blue pants and a billowy fine white shirt with a turquoise vest on top and a pair of sturdy, practical leather boots that are easy for her to walk in. Ana even braids her hair for her, curling the long braid up into a bun on top of her head so it doesn’t get in her way. She wishes she could dress like this in the palace, comfortable and practical and no complicated shoes or flowy dresses to get in her way.

The crew seems slightly less afraid of her now that they’ve decided she’s not here to torture or kill them. The mermaid part wasn’t the issue, apparently, it was the sea witch bit which had made them so concerned, but she doesn’t think what she’s about to do will help with that. It’s nearly dawn already, and it would take them weeks to sail back to her island from where they are now. She can’t be missing for weeks, nor does she want to go back alone and be forced to wait the Darling ship to get to her, wasting all her precious time. She can’t afford that.

So she’s just going to have to transport them herself.

She can move them through the water at speeds fast enough that they can be there in a couple of hours by bending the space around her, by cheating a little with some physical and temporal manipulation, just like she does when she transports herself long distances, except on a much larger scale. But she can’t manage to do that surrounded by air, and even if she could, she probably shouldn’t. It would be rather impossible for anyone who saw them traveling to either understand or dismiss what they were seeing, after all.

She stands at the helm of the ship, John and Ana Darling standing beside her. Maria and their daughter, Ariana, are safe beneath the ship along with the crew. It’ll be safe enough once the spell gets going, but the process of it can be a little rough, and it’s not like she’s done this before.

“You’re sure you don’t want to wait somewhere safer?” Tuyet asks, her trident in her hand.

“You couldn’t pay me to miss this,” John says, and Ana gives a nod of agreement, her eyes alight with curiosity.

Tuyet sighs. “Just. Fine.” She snaps her fingers and a rope shakes itself to life, twining around Ana and John’s waists and cinching them together, before wrapping itself around Tuyet’s hips. “Don’t move.”

“Where are we going to go?” Ana grumbles, shifting herself enough so that she’s snuggled up against John’s chest instead of the two of them just being awkwardly smushed together.

Tuyet ignores them, raising her trident above her head. She considered doing a sweeping motion, started from the front of the boat to the back, which would certainly be easier physically and magically, but has slightly too high of a chance to end with her sinking boat. Which wouldn’t be a problem for her, but would definitely be a problem for all the humans on board.

Instead she twirls her trident above her head, keeping the pace steady and even, and lets her power build up and around the ship gradually. The water churns around them, swirling in the direction of her trident, even as Tuyet keeps the water below the ship steady. The water rises slowly until it’s nearly spilling onto the deck, and then she uses her free hand to direct another stream of magic around the boat, erecting a barrier around the ship which pushes the water back by several dozen feet.

The ship sinks.

Slowly, it gets lower and lower, the small tsunami rising around them and dragging the boat down beneath the surface of the waves in the eye of the storm, so they can still see the night sky above them. The barrier holds, water rushing against and around it, until they’re completely submerged, held suspended by a pocket of air, but the miniature tsunami is still going strong above them.

Now for the tricky part.

She lets go her control of the tsunami, taking her trident and slamming it to the floor, handle first.

The water comes rushing in, knocking both the barrier and the ship to the side. Tuyet tugs the ship back upright before it can flip over, but the force of it is enough that the rope around her hips burns against her skin as John and Ana are knocked aside, not hitting the side of the ship only because they’re still attached to Tuyet, so they both just end up stumbling and falling over instead.

Tuyet doesn’t check on them, too focused on getting this next part right. They’re barely below the surface, and if she’s going to do this, they need to be much deeper. The problem is that humans are delicate, and if she goes too deep the pressure will kill them even if they still have oxygen. So she has to maintain the current pressure within the barrier even as she brings them miles deeper into the ocean, to depths that could even kill some mermaids.

This transportation magic works best at deeper pressure, which is why it’s so difficult even for those who practice advanced magics. She has to balance that against how much magic she’s able to spare to keep the pressure inside so different from the pressure outside.

Finally they reach the right point, deep enough that she should be able to manage the transportation spell while not so deep that she won’t be able to maintain the barrier. It’s easier then, to finish off the spell and lock the barrier in place. It still costs her magic, of course, but now that she’s not actively changing and molding it, it’s much easier to maintain.

“Are you okay?” she asks, finally able to split her concentration enough to not be entirely focused on the spell.

Ana is looking around them in wonder, a bright grin across her face as she twists her head around, trying to look at everything around them all at once, like an excited little kid. It’s unexpectedly endearing to see such a fearsome, bloodied pirate to be so entranced.

John is staring at her.

Tuyet can’t help the discomfort crawling across her skin as he looks at her, eyes wide and mouth parted. She snaps her fingers and the rope loosens and falls away. Ana runs towards the edge of the ship before hesitating and changing course, going to below the ship to get everyone else.

“Are you okay?” Tuyet repeats, unsure if she should be offended or upset, or well, something with the way John is looking at her.

He shakes his head. “Princess, I know that – I just didn’t expect it, is all. That was very impressive.”

“Well, I learned it all from Caligula,” she answers, and tries not to sound as bitter as she feels. Even the things she hadn’t learned from Caligula personally she’d picked up from her scrolls after she’d died.

“No,” he says slowly, “No, I don’t think you did.”

She intends to ask him what he means by that, but she’s distracted by everyone coming up and rushing to the edges, all of them just as excited as Ana, and she smiles without thinking about it. She loves the ocean. It’s her home, after all, even if she’d been fascinated by the human world, even if she’d been fascinated by Elias before she even knew him, it had been about wanting to go somewhere else rather than about leaving where she was. It’s nice to see people appreciating it, to be so delighted just to see a dark ocean, to find themselves in the sea and to fall in love instantly. 

She knows the feeling.

“You’re going to have to talk to them,” she says, even as she pulls the transportation spell together in her hands, preparing to apply it to the barrier and the ship both to bring them both back to her island. “My people don’t know what I am. They think I’m a princess from some little southern nation.”

John blinks. “You – how are you planning to explain us? How did you manage to forge a treaty between the prince and a nation that doesn’t exist?

It takes her several confused seconds to figure out what he’s saying. “Oh, Elias knows. He summoned me and made a deal to save his kingdom. No one else knows, though, just the king. You don’t have to lie to him. But everyone else thinks I’m human. Well, actually, I don’t think Elias knows I’m a princess, it’s not exactly relevant information.” She takes a moment to consider the first part of his question. “I’ll just say I took a boat out but lost control of it and was pushed out into the ocean, but luckily I got picked up by you.”

She takes a moment to cast the transportation spell and laughs at the crew’s shouts of alarm and delight at the ship whirs through the sea at speeds the no normal vessel could withstand, never mind travel. The water seems to pulse around them, and effect of the transportation spell skipping over several physical spaces to get them there as quickly as possible.

“That’s sounds slightly unbelievable,” he says, and she shrugs. What else are they going to think? That she’s a sea witch? Unlikely. “What did the king trade for your help?”

She smirks. “Everything, and nothing.” John’s eyebrows push together. She doesn’t have to explain herself, but he’s as close to her own kind as she’s come in so long, someone who had made the same choices she had, someone who isn’t coming to her and asking for impossible things, things that either anger and blacken her heat or threaten to break it. It feels like maybe she can talk to him and be understood. He knows both the world of the sea and the world of air, after all. “I asked him for his kingdom, but I can’t keep it. He doesn’t know that and it’s important that it stays that way. Intent and willingness to sacrifice isn’t as powerful as actual sacrifice, but it’s powerful all the same.”

“Why would you save a kingdom you can’t keep, for payment that will only be returned?” he asks.

She shrugs, shifting her concentration to guiding them through the spell. It’s not as quick as when she transports herself, and she does need to pay some attention to it. The ship and all its people aren’t as durable as she is in addition to it all being so much more for her to transport. “It’s nice up here, with the humans, don’t you think?”

They’re strange and a little backwards, but also interesting and kind. She’ll have to return to the ocean, to being the feared sea witch, but until then she can have this, can have being the strange and new queen, can be the one that saves Elias’s island for him.

John’s not looking at her anymore. Instead he’s looking towards his wives, Ana holding Ariana on her hip as Maria sits at the front of the ship. “Yeah.”

Tuyet nudges him in the side. “All right, tell me what’s going on with my island. The previous king had been friendly with pirates for years. What happened?”

He tells her.

It’s both worse and better than she’d feared.

~

Tuyet can’t bring the ship right up at the docks, even though she could, because a pirate ship emerging from the ocean in front of everyone might be a little hard to explain, so she has to do it far out enough that hopefully no one’s looking in their direction with a telescope, and even if they were, it’s a lot easier to dismiss one or two people as seeing things than the hundreds walking the docks.

There’s the small issue of them being on a pirate ship and her island being under constant attack from pirates, so getting close is going to pose a small challenge regardless. She ends up having to spell their sails white so her navy doesn’t attack before they’re close enough. “Why don’t you have any white flags?”

“Why would we?” Maria asks. “Surrendering’s for cowards.”

Pirates. Honestly.

“That’s the spirit,” she says, only a little bit sarcastically.

Several of her naval ships come out to meet them, and she’s really glad she took the time to introduce herself to everyone. “Captain Roberts!” she shouts across the space between their ships. “How are you this morning?”

The sun is high in the sky, but still early enough that hopefully no one has noticed her missing yet. The possibility of someone waking her for an early breakfast seems like it could be possible, but she really doesn’t know enough about human rituals to say for sure.

He opens his mouth, closes it, rubs at his eyes, then tentatively says, “Your highness?”

“So glad you’re here, could you please provide an escort back?” she asks. “I have some people for my husband to meet.”

He turns towards his first mate, who only shrugs, then he says, “Uh. Yes, of course, your highness.”

“Lovely!” She continues smiling at them expectantly until two of the naval ships come up beside them to sail back with them to shore.

John hands her Ariana so he can cross his arms and scowl. Him and his wives are a matched set, all of them looking equally disgruntled. “Navy,” Ana says derisively. “What have we come to?”

Tuyet spends a moment trying to figure out how to hold the baby so she doesn’t hurt her, and ends up with her warm weight on her hip and against her side. “Hey, watch it, that’s my navy.”

They all shoot her an unimpressed look, and she turns away mostly so they don’t see her laughing.

~

The bad news is they definitely noticed that she was missing.

The good news is that she walks into the throne room while they’re still in the middle of arguing about what to do about it, which means she’s at least managed to come back in time to prevent them from alerting the whole island.

Elias sees her and glares, probably because he’s been the one stuck trying to convince his advisors and guards that it’s perfectly fine and acceptable that no one can seem to find his wife and queen. Said advisors, who she thinks are Peter and Godfrey but there are so many of them it’s a little hard to keep track, seem horrified, but she assumes that has more to do with the pirates walking behind her. Darius smiles at her automatically, looking her right in the face before seeming to remember he’s not supposed to do that. He looks away but his eyes get caught on the people standing behind her and he raises an eyebrow.

Isobel is there too, which Tuyet hadn’t expected, and she’s clutching a handkerchief to her chest, her eyes red rimmed and face splotchy. “Oh, your highness!”

She rushes forward, but trips on her long dress. This is why it’s impractical for everyone to be be wearing these things. Tuyet reaches out to steady her and push her upright, gripping Isobel’s forearms. “Are you okay?”

Isobel sniffs then bursts into tears. Tuyet shoots Elias a bewildered look, but her husband seems more than happy to let her handle this on her own. “I was so worried, I thought you’d done something terrible and it was all my fault!”

“Oh, um, I didn’t, everything’s fine,” she says, and tugs Isobel one step closer to pull her into a hug, because the other option is just standing there as she cries, which seems awkward for everyone.

She freezes for a moment, then grips her back, fisting her hands into the sides of Tuyet’s vest and resting her forehead on her shoulder for long moment, taking several deep breathes before she pulls back and gives Tuyet a tremulous smile, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief.

“This is why the queen needs her ladies,” the advisor that Tuyet is pretty sure is Godfrey says. “She doesn’t know our customs. She just can’t go out walking in the middle of the night!” Peter harrumphs in agreement, his eyes narrowed beneath his extremely bushy eyebrows.

Elias nods and adopts a polite, vacant smile which looks painfully practiced.

Tuyet is certain that he got used to it when he was still a prince who was beholden to his advisors, when he was a boy growing up in the palace where his power was all theoretical, where it was about the power he’d have one day and not the power he had then.

It seems some people haven’t figured out that one day has came and passed.

“Is it common for people here to treat their king so disrespectfully?” she asks coolly, and the advisors startle as if they hadn’t expected her to speak. “You would do well to remember your place at this court, it seems.” If people could kill with their eyes, Peter and Godfrey would have to be tried for the crime of murdering their queen. “However, I would hate for my people to think I’m not dedicated to them and their culture.” She turns to Elias. “How many ladies do I need?”

His smile has warmed to something that looks a little less practiced. “At least four.”

“All right,” she says. “I pick Isobel.”

She gasps, her eyes widening, and immediately drops into a curtsey.

Peter’s lip curls back in a not-quite snarl. “Acceptable, I suppose, although they should really be of a more notable rank, and a less promiscuous lineage.” 

Isobel’s face burns a bright red and Darius impossibly stands a little straighter, which can’t be comfortable.

Oh, she’s going to make him regret that. She was playing nice before, but if he’s not going to do so in turn, then she’s just wasting her time by pretending that he actually gets a say in what she does.

She’s a princess of the ocean, a sea witch, and his queen. She doesn’t answer to him about anything.

“I’ll be taking Riley as well,” she announces.

Godfrey frowns. “I don’t know a Lady Riley.”

“She’s the seamstress’s daughter,” she says. “I like her.”

“That’s unacceptable! Have some decorum!” Peter shouts, his face turning an unattractive shade of red.

Tuyet smiles. “Yell at me again and I’ll order for your tongue to be ripped out and served for dinner.” She’d love to do it herself, but she’s almost totally certain that that’s not the sort of things that human queens do.

She’s been working so hard to soften all her hard, twisted edges. But she doesn’t have the energy to dredge up kindness for people who aren’t being kind to her, for people who seem interested in getting in her way and telling her what to do. People in and of the ocean are terrified of her, and while she’d prefer they weren’t, that doesn’t mean they don’t have reason to be.

Peter’s mouth snaps shut with audible click.

“I’ll also be taking Ana Darling and Maria Freeman,” she adds, gesturing behind her.

“Like the pirates?” Godfrey asks, confused, and then tentatively clears his throat when Tuyet raises an eyebrow. “Ah, your highness, I just meant that you haven’t introduced us to your. Friends.”

“I’m Captain John Darling,” John offers, and it says a lot about his reputation that everyone pales and takes several steps back, even though there’s really only so intimidating he can be while holding his daughter.

“Yes, Godfrey,” Tuyet says, grinning. “Like the pirates.”

~

It takes longer than Tuyet would like to get her husband and her pirates alone together, instead having to endure several more advisors coming in and trying to tell her what to do, which is exhausting and also pointless.

She sends Isobel to prepare rooms for her guests, and tells one of the less annoying advisors, Frederick, that there’s a ship full of pirates that will need comfortable accommodations in the city who are currently waiting in the harbor, and sends Darius to tell Riley about her promotion, although that one takes longer than she thought because she has to write all these very fancy letters officially declaring everyone’s status. She hands them to Isobel, Maria, and Ana while they’re still wet, but spends about a minute blowing on Riley’s before it’s dry enough to be folded and handed over to Darius.

Elias takes them to a side room off of the library, one she hasn’t been in before. It’s got a large oak desk that’s covered in books and scrolls and other papers, as well as several bookcases that have tomes haphazardly stacked on their shelves and several delicate oil lamps.

For some reason she hadn’t gotten the impression that Elias would have an office separate from his rooms, or that it would be this messy, but that’s clearly what this is.

“All right,” he says, locking the door behind him before turning around to face them. He presses his lips together and raises an eyebrow.

It takes Tuyet a moment to realize that it’s directed at her and not just a general facial expression. “Oh, they know I’m a sea witch. I’ve met them before.”

Elias doesn’t look reassured. If anything, he just seems more uneasy. “Is – did you,” he pauses. Tuyet truly has no idea what he’s trying to ask. “I’d heard they were killed. I know people who’d seen them die.”

Tuyet thought she’d seen them die too, but clearly she’d been wrong. Or, well, she’d seen dead people that looked like them. What she thinks happened was Ana traded her unborn child to Caligula in exchange for bewitching some other people to look like them and get killed in their stead, but it’s not like Tuyet’s asked. “Well, they’re not dead.”

“No,” Elias says, looking at her in an intense sort of way that she doesn’t understand. She wishes he’d speak plainly.

“She didn’t resurrect us,” John says.

Elias’s shoulders slump in relief and Tuyet doesn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered. “Really?”

“I don’t know, what can’t you do?” he asks, but not like he’s expecting an answer. “You disappear in the middle of the night – if you could please give me a heads up next time you do that it’ll make it a lot easier to cover for you – and then you come back with three pirates, who I’d have sworn were dead, and a baby!”

“The baby belongs to the pirates,” she says.

John holds out Ariana to Elias, his lips twitching. “Your highness.”

He takes a step back, holding his hands out in front of him. “Oh no, thank you, but I’ve never, I don’t really know how to, well, you understand.”

“Not really, no,” Ana says, and Maria nudges her in the side.

Tuyet rolls her eyes and plucks Ariana out of John’s hands. She seems as unbothered by this as she does everything else. Tuyet supposes growing up on ship and being constantly passed around among the crew makes for either a very happy or very upset baby. “You’re a king, you can’t be afraid of a baby.”

“I don’t see why not,” he says, but at least doesn’t try and run away when Tuyet positions his arms and gently places Ariana in them, lifting his elbow so he’s supporting her head.

He’s clearly terrified and it’s probably not very nice of her to find it as funny as she does. Ariana looks at Elias with her big brown eyes and must deem him acceptable because she doesn’t start crying. He offers her an uncertain smile.

Actually, she’s changed her mind, this is adorable.

“First time holding a baby?” Ana asks sympathetically. “Just don’t drop her, if you don’t mind.”

“She’s beautiful,” he says earnestly, to his credit addressing all three of them.

Maria beams. “Thanks, she’s homemade. Took about nine months and it was my first try, but I think it turned out all right.”

Elias laughs, then looks worried like he wasn’t supposed to.

Honestly, has no one ever taught this boy to be a king? It seems like that’s something else she’ll have to do before she leaves in addition to saving his island.

Tuyet gently lifts Ariana out of his arms and hands her back to her father. She pretends not to see the disappointment that flashes across Elias’s face and the way he flexes his hands after.

“Now that we’re all better acquainted,” she says as she pushes some of the books to the side of the desk so she can sit on top of it, “tell my husband what you told me.”

John sighs as Maria’s face hardens.

“You think you have a pirate problem,” Ana says, “but what you really have is neighbor problem. The pirates aren’t after you because of something that happened with them. They’re after you because they’re pirates, and for enough gold they can become mercenaries.”

Elias shakes his head even as his hands clench into fists. “No, that doesn’t make sense. Who would do that?”

Ana is eyeing him nervously, like she doesn’t trust the fists he’s making. Tuyet’s doesn’t believe he’s the type to get violent, but now’s not the time to reassure Ana of that. She steps in front of Elias and says, “It’d be easier to say who wouldn’t. All those allies who supposedly wouldn’t send aid because you weren’t a king? They were never going to send aid, and they’re not going to respond to the requests for aid you sent after our wedding. Those who do truly want to help you are being coerced by those who want to hurt you.” It’s actually very likely that several of these allies are truly allies that just aren’t looking to piss off a bigger power who they believe is being pedantic and slow to respond rather than actively malicious, but Tuyet doesn’t want to give Elias false hope in case she’s wrong.

“If that’s true,” he says, and she imagines this must be quite a shock so she doesn’t roll her eyes, “then what are we supposed to do? If they decide to formally declare war on us, there’s no way we’ll be able to stand against all their militaries. We’re barely able to keep the pirates back.”

“If it makes you feel better, they probably won’t do that, because then they’ll be formally breaking their treaties, which will give everyone else a reason to break their treaties with them,” John says. “It’s one thing to do something like this, underhanded and deniable, and another to openly call their own trustworthiness and respectability into question.”

Elias doesn’t look like that makes him feel better.

Tuyet lays a hand on his arm, and she means it to be comforting, but he flinches. She starts to pull her hand away, but he leans back into it, so she stops, curling her fingers around his bicep and squeezing as she says, “Don’t worry, I have a plan.”

He still looks worried, but he smiles at her anyway. It’s not practiced and polite, in fact it’s a little nervous, which is why she smiles back.

She’s going to save their island, and teach him to act like a king, and fix John Darling while she’s at it.

It’s going to be really difficult to go back to her cave after this, after having this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	8. Chapter 8

When she steps out of her room the next morning Cetus back in the form of a silvery serpent and resting around her throat like a necklace. Darius is there waiting for her, which doesn’t surprise her.

Fiona is there, which does.

“Hello,” Tuyet says, smiling.

Fiona doesn’t return it, instead just stares at her, her lips pressed together and a pinched look around her eyes. “I saw my daughter’s letter.”

“Oh.” Does Fiona not want Riley to be one of Tuyet’s ladies? Should she have asked her first? Not knowing the customs here is really exhausting. One of the benefits of having these ladies following her around all the time is going to be that she can just ask them to explain whatever new thing doesn’t make sense to her. “Is it a problem?”

Fiona just continues standing there, and Tuyet is growing more and more confused. Finally she reaches out to pluck the at the edges of her skirt. “Is this the style you like?”

“I like being able to move,” she says. She’s in a grey silk dress, except she’s modified it the same way as the others, opening the shoulders and cutting slits up the thighs and wearing leggings and boots underneath. She misses the pirates’ practical clothes, but she can move in this, she can fight in it if she has to. If nothing else the crown on her head makes a great blunt weapon.

Fiona nods and says, “All right,” before walking away.

Tuyet isn’t actually any less confused. She turns to Darius and raises an eyebrow.

He looks down the hall, checking that Fiona has turned the corner before he says, “It’s a really big deal, what you’re doing for Riley. They moved her into the nobles’ wing last night.”

“Is her mom upset because she’s not living with her anymore?” she asks. “Fiona can move too.” It hadn’t even occurred to her that Riley would need to be moved. She should probably thank Isobel for arranging that. Maybe having ladies is actually a good thing, on top of explaining things to her, they can deal with all the queen things she doesn’t care about. Well, Isobel and Riley can, she obviously has other plans for Maria and Ana.

“Fiona is very grateful for what you’ve done,” Darius says. “As one of your ladies, it doesn’t even matter that Riley’s not a noble by birth. She’ll be able to make a good marriage now, to some other minor noble.”

If the best Riley can hope for is an advantageous marriage, Tuyet’s pretty sure there are some other issues at play here. But she makes a mental note to arrange that, if it’s something Riley wants, before she leaves. Or at least ask Elias to do it for her. She wouldn’t want her absence to mess anything up for Riley and end up accidently demoting her back down to a servant.

Darius shifts his weight from one foot to another. “I’m grateful too. Thank you for choosing Isobel.”

“She’s already a noble,” Tuyet points out. Surely she’s not also in need of a good marriage?

He grimaces. “Yes, but our father has a reputation, and her parents aren’t very highly ranked. It does her a lot of good, to be seen as part of your household.”

Tuyet almost asks about how nobles can be ranked higher than others, since in the ocean ranks are determined by how deep mermaids can swim before the pressure pops a blood vessel, and she’s pretty sure humans don’t measure these things in quite the same way, but she’s certain the answer would either confuse or infuriate her, so she keeps it to herself. “Well, she’s really sweet, and I’m glad to be able to help out your sister. Although she actually listens to me, so I don’t see the family resemblance.”

Darius just rolls his eyes.

“Have you seen Elias?” she asks. One advantage to having her room right across from Elias’s is that her guards see him coming and going. The fact that there are no guards currently outside the king’s door means he’s already left.

“He said he was going to the western meeting room with your,” Darius hesitates, “guests.”

Oh, she’s been to that room. She starts walking and Darius stays a half step behind her, which is a little annoying but he’s talking to her without kicking up a fuss about propriety, so she decides not to mention it. “You have questions about the pirates.”

He’s silent, and she’s about to snap at him when he says, “I don’t even understand how you found them, never mind convinced them to help us. They’re supposed to be _dead_, and have successfully convinced everyone of that, but you just happen to run into them? And then they come to a place that could kill or imprison them? I’m not convinced they’re here to actually help us and that they’re not planning to kill and rob us in our sleep.”

“Something like that,” she says. “I gave them my word that they wouldn’t be killed or imprisoned. If I can’t protect a couple pirates then this whole queen business is all rather pointless, don’t you think?”

Darius still doesn’t look convinced, but they’ve made it to the western meeting room, so he just shakes his head. They’d passed several people in the halls, and they’d all given Darius wide eyed, incredulous looks. Even if they couldn’t hear what he was saying, they could see that he was speaking, which is apparently scandalous enough all on its own, even when they can’t hear him questioning her.

Elias’s guard is glancing between them with a look on his face hovering somewhere between incredulous and suspicious. Tuyet shoots him a bight grin then addresses Darius. “Don’t let anyone disturb us.”

He nods and she squeezes his arm gratefully before stepping inside.

It’s probably for the best guards are outside, because they’d throw an absolute fit about this.

Elias has put aside his heavy jacket and crown and is fighting Maria. They’re sword fighting while Ana and John play spectator, Ariana asleep in a basinet that someone has gotten from somewhere. For a moment Tuyet wonders if she should be worried about them fighting with live blades, but they both know what they’re doing, and its not like it’ll be too much effort to reattach a limb or two if need be.

“I see I’m interrupting a very serious meeting,” she says, coming to stand next to John.

Ana waves in greeting. “Your king insisted on waiting for you to discuss anything serious, but it seemed like a waste to just sit around talking. I’m next.”

Tuyet ignores the way Ana’s words make warmth blossom in her chest. “Have you been waiting long?”

Ana shakes her head. John says, “We wake with the sun, but King Elias only summoned us about an hour ago. I headed down into the city to check on the crew.”

“Anything I need to punish someone for?” she asks. She should probably figure out how punishments work here. Or she could just let Elias handle it, except that he doesn’t seem like he’d dispense punishments with the sort of authority she’d approve of. Maybe this can be practice? She should get him a dog or something, something he can tell what to do without there being any witnesses to see how very bad he is at it.

John shakes his head. “They’ve been put up in one of the inns. They are making a nuisance of themselves at the market, but it’s been a long time since they were on land. They’re very much leading into their reputations as fearsome pirates.”

Tuyet raises an eyebrow. She wants the crew to be welcome here, but not at cost of her people’s safety. If she has to hogtie the whole crew and stuff them in the dungeons to keep them from either getting harassed or doing the harassing, she will.

“They’re desperate and pathetically flirtatious,” Ana clarifies. “I think there’s possibly some sort of competition going on about how many locals they can bed. They’re seem to think pretty girls and boys are impressed with war stories.”

“Are they?” Tuyet asks. Talking about all the destruction she’s caused wouldn’t be her first choice of an opening line, but she’s hardly the expert here.

“Depends,” John says. “Sometimes. It’s always worked on me.”

Ana pats his thigh then leaves her hand there. “And you are very pretty, darling.”

There’s a shout and a clatter, and Tuyet looks over to see Elias with his hands up and Maria with the tip of her sword against Elias’s throat. Ana and John start clapping and Tuyet puts her hands on her hips. “Elias, really?”

“She’s very good!” he says as Maria lowers her sword, a grin across his face as he wipes his arm across his forehead. “You’re very good.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice,” she says smugly, then bends down to pick up Elias’s sword and hand it back to him. “You’re quite good, for someone without much combat experience.”

Tuyet knows plenty of people who would take offence to a comment like that. “I suppose compared to you, I haven’t had much experience,” he says gracefully.

“My turn!” Ana says, eagerly jumping down to switch places with Maria.

Elias raises his sword, but John says, “Doesn’t seem fair to him, considering he’s already fought Maria.”

Ana considers this and switches her sword from her left hand to her right and then places her left hand at the small of her back. “Better?”

“I fear it will only make me look all the worse when you beat me regardless, but I appreciate the accommodation,” Elias says, then their blades are flying through the air, the soft sounds of metal against metal between them.

“Do you want to learn?” John asks, and it takes her a moment to pull her eyes away from the spar and realize that he’s talking to her. “Or is it not the fight you’re looking at?”

Elias is beautiful like this, but he’s beautiful all the time. She speaks quietly, so he can’t overhear. “I won’t be here long enough, I think.”

“You could be,” he says.

“I have no human heart, even a faulty one,” she says. “My magic will reach its limits and I’ll have to return to the ocean.”

He only hums, not seeming quite convinced. Her magic must seem immense to him, especially as he was only an average merman, but even the deepest parts of the ocean has a bottom.

Maria leans over, putting a hand on John’s shoulder for balance. “If you want to learn, I can teach you. Your body is quick and strong. You’ll pick it up quickly, I think.”

It seems a waste, to spend what little time she has on that, to learn a skill that won’t exactly be applicable in the sea, but she says, “All right,” anyway.

There’s another clatter and Tuyet looks over to see Elias in the same position as before, his arms raised and a sword at his throat. He doesn’t look upset at his loss, but he does seem suspicious. Ana lowers her sword and he turns to Maria. “You were playing with me!”

“A little,” she admits. “But only because I enjoyed fighting against you. We’ve been trying to avoid notice for a while now and my crew won’t spar with me anymore, so my fighting partners are limited to either John or Ana.”

That mollifies Elias and he says, “I would love to spar with you whenever you’d like, Miss Freeman.”

“You’re going to regret that offer,” she says, but its easy to see she’s excited at that idea.

“I don’t believe I will,” he says. “But in any case, I suppose we’ve delayed long enough. Do you have the lists?”

John reaches behind him and lifts a scroll. He unrolls it, laying it flat on the table, and they all crowd around it. It’s a long list of names, some Tuyet recognizes but most she doesn’t. It’s every pirate captain he and his wives could think of that frequently sails the nearby waters. It’s a long list.

“This is going to take me at least a week,” she sighs.

“Just a week?” John asks, with a level of incredulity she’s not sure she appreciates. “There’s nearly a hundred names on here.”

She shrugs, even as Cetus moves against her throat, nudging the side of her neck in way that Tuyet interprets as him agreeing with John, so she ignores it. “The transportation spell is a lot easier when I’m only transporting myself and not a ship. Besides, I can cast a tracking spell before I go so they’re grouped in clusters instead of transporting myself back and forth across the ocean, and that will make moving between them even easier.”

“Are you sure?” Elias asks. “It sounds like a lot for you to do.”

“It sounds like something I’d have said was impossible if I hadn’t seen you moving my ship,” John adds.

She doesn’t roll her eyes, but it’s a near thing. “Look, getting the pirates off our back is actually the easiest part of all this. I’m the sea witch, they’re terrified of me, as they should be. Scaring them off with threats isn’t a long term solution, which is why I hadn’t done it in the first place, but it’ll make them back off for a while. Since we won’t have to worry about defending the island against pirate attacks, we’ll be better able positioned to go after the people who are really attacking our island. You’re sure Kia will host the ball like you’ve asked? And that everyone else will show up if they do?” She’s actually asking if Elias is sure he can trust this other island country not to be one of the conspirators against them.

He must pick up on that because he sighs. “They’re one of the few people who actually sent us supplies, per our treaty. Besides that, we’ve always been friendly with one another, and their current King is actually one of my cousins, however distantly. Not that would necessarily stop anyone, but I have no reason to doubt him or his island.”

“And everyone else will show up?” Maria repeats. “Kia isn’t very big. It’s possible the other kingdoms will snub their invitation.”

Elias shakes his head. “That won’t happen. Their island is filled with refineries, a lot of countries export their raw materials there for processing. They’re small, but powerful in how useful they are to everyone else. It’s not worth upsetting them over something so small as a ball. Although I’m still not sure doing this at a party of all things is the best idea.”

“It’s the only idea that will do what we need,” Tuyet says. “We need everyone together so we can figure out who’s in on this and who isn’t, and we need those countries who support you to condemn those who acted against you, publicly and quickly. That can’t happen when everyone is spread out and in their homelands, and it’s not like they’ll travel to talk peace if they know it’s for you. Tricking them into coming to a party is the best way to get them all together, and it has the added bonus of catching them off their guard, where they’d enter a negotiation summit already on their guard.”

Elias is still frowning. “It just seems a little underhanded.”

This time Tuyet doesn’t stop herself from rolling her eyes. “That’s because it is. You’re a king now, sometimes you have to be less than completely honest to move things along. You can’t go through your whole reign being honest and forthright about everything, you’ll never get anything done.”

“Right,” he says slowly, giving her a strange look that she doesn’t quite understand. He’s not disagreeing with her, so she’s not sure what the problem is.

“But not so dishonest and deceitful that you bribe every pirate on this side of the ocean into attacking your enemies so you can secretly break your treaty without getting caught,” Ana adds.

Tuyet nods, “Right. There’s a balance.”

“A balance,” he repeats slowly. “Okay.”

She knows this is hard for him, thrust into the role of king long before he thought he’d need to, but she doesn’t understand how he expects to run a kingdom without acting like a king. She’s the youngest of her sisters, and so had assumed she’d never need to rule, but she’d been_ raised _to, had been raised to handle the throne if she needed to, had been raised with a sense of entitlement to the ocean and her place in it.

She doesn’t understand how Elias hasn’t been or how to teach him to be different, to teach him that these people are _his_, that this kingdom is _his_. His to protect, his to care for, but belonging to him all the same.

“I’ll get started tonight,” she says. “I can do the scrying now and figure out a plan of attack.”

“So you’re sneaking out again?” Elias asks.

“I’ll have to, won’t I?” she asks. “Everyone gets so nervous when I leave, and I get the impression it’s weird if I’m out all night. At least I know how to get out now.” She should probably give Isobel a heads up so she doesn’t have some sort of heart attack when she drops down onto her balcony.

John crosses his arms. “All right, but when are you planning to sleep? Even you need to sleep sometimes.”

It’s true, even if she wishes it wasn’t. It’s especially true now, when she’s forced herself into a human shape, and such a shape has human needs she has to accommodate if she’s going to conserve her magic effectively. “I’ll figure it out. I don’t need as much sleep as a human.” A couple hours a night should be enough, if not ideal. “Do queens take naps?”

“Queens do whatever they want,” Maria says, which is an excellent point. “However, napping in the middle of the day wouldn’t be the best look. Luckily, you have a built in excuse to disappear for a couple hours in the middle of the day that won’t look bad at all. It’s for the good of the kingdom, after all.”

Maria’s smirk is dangerously close to turning to a leer. Ana and John are laughing while Elias flushes. “What?”

Ana leans over to pat Tuyet’s stomach and she’s so confused she doesn’t even stop her. “One of the most important duties of a new queen is to supply the kingdom with a prince. Besides that, look at you, it’s not like anyone will have trouble believing that that their newly married king is having trouble keeping his hands off his wife.”

Oh, she gets it now. “It won’t look bad if we disappear in the middle of the day, in the midst of the war, to have sex?”

Maria shrugs. “They want a happy king and a secure line of succession. The advisors will be thrilled.”

She hates advisors. If it wouldn’t make Elias’s life harder once she’d left, she’d fire the lot of them. Well, a couple are useful and do as she orders without being snarky about it, but overall they all just cause more problems than they solve.

“Okay,” she agrees. “Is there a typical time for this sort of thing?” Humans are so weird. She could spend her whole life here and she doesn’t think she’d ever understand them.

“I wouldn’t say typical,” John says, and she glares at him because it’s obvious he’s trying to keep from laughing. She’s not sure what’s supposed to be so funny, but she doesn’t like not being in on the joke. “But after lunch would likely be the least conspicuous.”

“Does that work for you?” Tuyet asks Elias. “You’ll have to be stuck in your room with me, otherwise I don’t think the lie will exactly stick.”

He has to clear his throat before he says, “No problem.”

Ana snorts and Elias glares at her but she just gives him a sunny smile in return.

Humans.

~

Riley is so grateful that it makes Tuyet a little uncomfortable, which Riley must realize because she drops it, only continues smiling at her with a pleased little grin, which isn’t so bad. She’s in a different dress, a complicated, opulent gown stiff with embroidery that is so much without actually being too much. Being the seamstress’s daughter has some perks, after all.

Isobel hides it better, but she’s taking her role as a one of her ladies very seriously, and whenever they pass other nobles, Isobel barely glances at them in a way that has to be purposeful, especially considering the angry, jealous glares they pin to her back.

Apparently being one of the queen’s ladies is a great honor and a huge status symbol. Tuyet images as someone who’s been looked down on at court for her father’s actions, this victory is all the sweeter.

Good. Having someone who plays court politics means having someone who can explain it to her.

It seems most of their job is to follow her around in case she decides she needs something and there’s no servant nearby, which feels a little ridiculous. Except actually having them there is brilliant because Riley knows all the servants and Isobel knows all the nobles so between them they know everyone, which is exactly what Tuyet needs, because she doesn’t know anyone. She mostly spends the day poking around the castle, trying to figure out where everything is and getting her ladies to introduce her to as many people as possible, even if it does make the servants really nervous. She may not be here long, but until she leaves, it’s her home, and she should know where things like ballrooms and broom closets are located.

That night she spreads out the map, considering her options. It’s heavy with her magic, the tracking spell making it glow in the darkness of her room. Cetus is coiled next to the map, tasting the air around it with quick, curious flicks of his tongue.

She’d used a map that was a couple years out of date since using the tracking spell on it would render it unusable, even after she removed the spell, so everything is just a little bit off. Luckily she knows the sea, and can make up for all the ways the map isn’t totally correct.

Actually, none of their maps are totally correct. She adds making them a new one onto her ever growing list of things to do before she leaves.

“What do you think Cetus?” she murmurs, tracing her hands across the map and the little dots that represent the pirates she has to go intimidate. “Start further and move closer?” The longer she stays on land, the weaker she’ll become. The transportation spell isn’t that draining, but it’s not like giving herself whatever advantage she can scrape together can hurt.

Cetus taps his nose to one spot in particular, not one she’d have chosen, then wriggles his body across the map like he’s swimming across the waves before opening his mouth and baring his teeth at the map.

“You want to help?” she asks. “Are you sure? You don’t have to.”

He just blinks at her.

“Right, you’re very old and very powerful, and you can make your own decisions,” she says. It’ll make her job a lot easier, which she assumes is the reason he’s doing it. “Thank you. Ready to go?”

Cetus gives a soft hiss and she holds out her hand so he can curl around her wrist.

She opens her window, gives everything a quick look around to make sure no one’s watching her, then jumps out of her window to land softly on Isobel’s balcony.

Her balcony door is unlocked and Isobel is still awake when Tuyet steps inside. She’s sitting in bed reading and does a great job of pretending she’s not startled, even though Tuyet had warned her. “Your highness,” she greets, starting to get out of bed to give her some sort of curtsey or something else equally unnecessary.

“It’s okay, don’t get up,” Tuyet says. “Have a good night.”

Isobel sighs and sinks back into her pillows, picking up her book once more. “You too, your highness.”

She does.

It’s much easier to scare pirates when she’s riding the back of a giant, silvery sea monster, and she barely has to use any magic at all with his long fangs dripping over terrified captains.

Cetus has fun too, so really this is a win for everyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com


	9. Chapter 9

After a week of terrorizing pirates and transporting herself what feels like across the whole ocean, Tuyet is exhausted.

She’s perfected coming back just after the guard has changed so that they think she just went on early morning walk, and not that she’s been out all night. She slips back into her room, manages a quick nap, then gets up to start another day as queen, which involves an awful lot of telling people they’re idiots who don’t know how to appropriately manage resources. Yes to the medical supplies for injured navy, no to the nobles’ request for a longer summer session, yes to the new roof for the grainery, no to literally anything that comes out of Geofrey’s mouth. The advisors keep looking to Elias, like he’s going to stop her or say something against her, but he just stands there with that smile that becomes less and less stiff that more she slaps down his advisors and all their terrible ideas.

Isobel had told her she was making a lot of enemies, but hadn’t seemed all that upset about it, while Riley had been delighted. Some of the servants even smile and wave at her when they see her in the halls now, which is nice.

She squeezes her sword fighting lessons with Maria in between dinner and working on ways to fix John’s heart. She’s come up with several short term solutions, but nothing truly promising. This, at least, she doesn’t have to worry too much about solving quickly. They know who and what she is, and Tuyet can meet them in the lagoon to help them after she’s no longer playing human queen, and her short term solutions will ensure nothing terrible happens to John while she’s figuring it out.

But only getting a few hours of sleep each between all this is exacting more a toll on her than she thought it would. She’s been ignoring it, because there’s valuable work for them to being doing, especially when they have to leave for the ball on Kia in a couple of days. Really, they should be leaving today, technically, but it’s not like they need to take wind or rough sees into account. Using the transportation spell to get them to Kia would be excessive, but urging the wind and waters into their favor is simple magic, so they have a little bit of time.

Her work is finally done in this area, however, every pirate captain on the Darlings’ list suitably quelled, and her muscles feel like jelly and she’s so bone deep tired that she’s even blinking slowly, her eyes protesting the need to open again every time they close. If she tries and goes through today like normal, she’s going to end up skinning the advisors alive, or at the very least cutting a couple tongues out. Which would be very satisfying, but she fears a bit unproductive overall.

Tuyet walks past her own room, and her guards resigned stares at seeing her coming down the hall rather then exiting her room. They know she’s sneaking out, but not how, and it’s not like they’re allowed to open her door to check, so they just make faces when she’s come back, and even that she knows is because they trust her not to have them executed for it. Darius usually doesn’t take up his shift at her door until later in the morning, just a bit before she normally starts her day, since everyone knows he’s her favorite and she’d rather spend the day with him following her around, but they must have told him about it since he’s asked her how she’s doing it. She hadn’t answered and changed the subject, but she was pleased that he’d had to ask, that Isobel hadn’t told her brother how Tuyet hopped to her balcony each night and snuck away using her unguarded room.

Elias’s guards glance at each other as she opens his door, but don’t move to stop her. She’s their queen and his wife, after all.

He’s still asleep. She starts stripping, pulling off her salt crusted and day old clothes. Leaving them on the beach is a good way not to caught, but also means she that her clothes come off a little bit more worse for wear than they would otherwise. She should probably find some time to go apologize to the laundresses at some point. She rifles though his closet until she finds one his soft tunics and pulls that on, so tired that she’s swaying on her feet as she pulls back the covers and slides into the other side of the bed.

“What?” he mumbles, his eyes fluttering open. He has such pretty eyelashes. She wants to count them. He freezes when he sees her, “Uh.”

“I want to sleep,” she says, pulling the blanket above her shoulders. “Stay in today, we’re skipping whatever morning meetings we have. Let the court think it’s more irresponsible sneaking off, I don’t care.”

She’s expecting an argument. She doesn’t know why. “All right,” he says. “I’ll get up and do some work at my desk.”

He starts to move out of the bed, but she reaches out, grabbing his wrist even as she snuggles more into the pillow. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. I don’t mind.” She considers the feeling of her stiff hair against her neck and says. “I do smell like the ocean. Sorry.” She dries herself off before coming back but doesn’t normally bother with wasting magic on a cleaning spell, not when she has a bathtub in her quarters that she’s finally figured out how to use.

“I like how you smell,” Elias says, relaxing back into bed. He twists his wrist in her grip and she lets go, guiltily pulling her arm back to her side of the bed. But he reaches out for her hand, threading their fingers together and letting their joined hands rest in the space between them. “Can I ask you something?”

“Okay,” she says sleepily. Elias’s hands are rough with callouses, and she likes it, everything else about him seems so soft and smooth, except for his hand in hers.

“Are you planning to kill me?”

She opens her eyes to stare at him. Maybe she’s even more tired than she thought. “What?”

“Are you planning to kill me?” he repeats. “I thought you were, I thought the was the deal, that you would take my place and rule my kingdom and keep it safe, which would be fine. It’s what I agreed to. But you didn’t kill me on our wedding night, and you keep talking about me being king, and you’re so nice to me, so I was just wondering.” She just keeps staring at him and he adds, “It’s okay if you are. You’re a really good queen, and you don’t let anyone push you around.” His smile is a little bitter. “Although I guess having enough power that it doesn’t matter if the nobility rebels against you helps.”

They can do that? No wonder Elias is so timid about acting as she thinks a king should if it’s something they can just take away from him.

“I’m not going to kill you,” she says. It certainly paints their wedding night in a different light, why he’d drank so much when she hasn’t seen him do it since, his strange questions all night, and all the looks he’d given her after that she hadn’t understood. “I was never planning to.”

His hand squeezes hers, his dark eyes soft and wide. “Okay,” he says, speaking quietly in the space between them. “Then why are you here? Why are you doing this? Why are you willing let me stay by your side when you don’t need me to rule this nation?”

She can’t tell him the truth, can’t tell him that her rule will be a temporary thing. He thought he was sacrificing his life to her, but the magic won’t hold up if he finds out that she’s not planning to keep what she’s taken, if he finds out the price of this bargain is an illusion. Bargain magic, sacrifice magic, has its own sort of power. There’s a reason Caligula had been so fond of it, and it wasn’t just because she was cruel. That type of magic made it possible to push the normal confines of power, and Tuyet needs all that type of power and magic she can get, because it’s what keeps her ocean heart from crumbling into salt when she spends too long on human land in a human form.

She can’t tell him the truth, but _a _truth slips out before she can stop it. “Maybe I wanted something that couldn’t be bought and sold, so I settled for something that could.”

Right then, she’s back to being a stupid, pathetic girl, back to being the girl who’d broken her father’s laws to save Elias’s life at his mother’s insistence, back to being the girl who’d been so desperate for a chance to love him that she’d been idiotic enough to trust Caligula, she was back to being a girl who’d seen a boy with a kind face and thought that she might love him, if only she might be able to know him.

“Me?” he asks. “What could you want with me? I’m just a human prince. There are plenty of us.”

“I’m just a sea witch,” she says, and it feels like her ocean heart is crumbling in her chest. “We always want what we can’t have.”

His eyebrows dip together, a little wrinkle forming in the space between them. “Who says you can’t have it?”

She blinks, not understanding, and he drags his body closer to hers, cupping her face with his free hand. He moves even closer and she presses her hand flat against his chest. “Stop. It’s worthless if it’s forced. I don’t want to have what you don’t want to give me.” She doesn’t want him lying to her, doesn’t want him forcing himself to pretend to care for her. She’s getting this, a chance to pretend at being his wife and his queen, and its enough. It’s more than she ever thought she’d have when she took Caligula’s spot.

“Not very like a sea witch of you,” he says, but he’s smiling. Why is he smiling? “Everyone spoke of how you terrified them. No one told me that you were beautiful. I wasn’t expecting it.” He lowers his head, and she’s so surprised she doesn’t think to stop him. Her hand curls into a fist against his chest, clenching the material of his shirt. “I wasn’t expecting your kindness either.”

His nose slides along hers, and if she’s going to stop him then this her last chance, but she doesn’t. He kisses her with his sour morning breath and soft lips, and she tugs him closer, opening her mouth as he shifts on top her, his knees around her hips.

She’s not exhausted anymore, has never been more awake in her life. She feels like electricity is crackling underneath her skin, like she’s swimming in the deepest part of the ocean, like she has the power to move a thousand ships. He kisses her slowly and thoroughly and when he pulls back she chases after his mouth with hers, desperate to have it back on her, and he gets out half a laugh before he’s kissing her again, his hands in her hair and big and warm over her.

“Sorry,” he mutters, kissing her neck, her ear, the arch of cheekbone. “I know you’re tired.”

She’s not, and even if she was, she wouldn’t care.

He rolls off of her, and for a moment the disappointment is crushing before he’s pulling at her shoulder, urging her to turn enough so she can rest on top of him, her head on his chest and his arm around his shoulders. “Get some sleep.”

Tuyet almost refuses, nearly pins him there so she can keep kissing him, wants to devour him, but she’s just said she doesn’t want to take what he doesn’t want to give, so she tilts her head up just enough to kiss the underside of his chin and says, “Okay.”

She tries to fall asleep like that, lets her body go slack and heavy against him, but she’s truly not tired anymore. He must think her asleep, because he presses a kiss to the top of her head and says, voice low with awe, “I can’t believe I get to keep you.”

Oh.

That’s why.

Sacrifice magic is powerful. She wonders if it’s his future sacrifice that’s fueling the spell, or the one she’s making now. She wonders if it matters.

They won’t be able to keep each other.

She’s a mermaid. She can’t live on land, not without tearing his heart from his chest, and she won’t do that to him. She cares about him too much, her soft, strong king who loves all his people so much, who might be able to grow to love her just as much, if only she stuck around long enough to give him the chance to do so.

But she’ll never find out. What they could be doesn’t matter, because it’s an impossible thing.

It’s a wonder that she doesn’t have power to turn the world inside out, with the weight of this sacrifice, with the way her heart is breaking in her chest

~

Tuyet thinks she’s doing a good job of hiding it, certainly neither Riley nor Isobel notice anything, because she thinks they’d say something if they did, and neither does Darius, because he’d definitely say something about it. But she’s about five minutes into her lesson with Maria when she forces Tuyet’s sword out of her hand with a quick flick of her wrist and asks, “What’s wrong?”

“What makes you think anything is wrong?” she asks, going to pick up her sword again.

Maria shoves her blade in her way and Tuyet glares at her, but she doesn’t move. “Don’t waste time lying to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“You know, most people are afraid of me,” she points out, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Most people don’t know you,” Maria says, sliding her sword back into its sheath and then putting away the one Tuyet had been using. “You’re distracted. There’s not point practicing when you’re distracted, and just because you could probably heal yourself if you lost a couple fingers isn’t a good reason to get blood all over these nice clean floors. Did you have any problems with the pirate captains?”

She shakes her head. Even when it had been exhausting, it has been fun too. She almost lies, almost thinks up some excuse to give her, but there are only three people who know most of her secrets, John and his wives, so if she doesn’t talk to one of them, she can’t talk to anyone. “Elias kissed me.”

“Is that a problem?” Maria asks when it becomes clear Tuyet isn’t going to add anything else. “I thought you liked the king. We couldn’t think of any other reason you’d trouble yourself with human affairs. And it’s obvious he likes you.”

“We don’t know each other,” she insists,

She shrugs. “Does it matter? Do you think I knew John when he attacked my ship? Of course not. I’d never met him before. But he was beautiful and violent and it made my blood sing just to look at him. I knew I wanted him. I knew that he was the kind of pirate I approved of, I knew that Ana the was only pirate who’d killed more people than I had. They were the type of people that I liked, and I wanted him in a way I’d never wanted any of the treasures I’d found, and he saw me and felt just the same. So I joined him instead of fighting him, instead of killing or being killed by him. You know the important bits about King Elias. You know he loves his people and is kind to those he doesn’t have to be kind to. You know he was willing to give his kingdom to you if it meant keeping it safe. You know he wants to kiss you. Can’t you just figure out the rest of it along the way? Unless you don’t like him, of course.”

Oh, to live in the world of Maria Freeman, to face problems as she faces them. “It’s not that easy. It doesn’t matter if I like him.”

“But do you?” she insists.

Tuyet wishes she was still holding her blade, wishes there was something she could break, but the only thing close to her is Maria, and obviously she doesn’t want to break her. “Do you remember when we met that first time? When Caligula attacked you?”

“I certainly haven’t forgotten,” she says dryly.

“That was my fault,” Tuyet says. “I’d been watching you, and I led her to you without meaning to. It’s why I couldn’t stand by and let her hurt you, not when it was my fault, not when I could prevent it.” She raises a hand to the necklace around her throat, to Princess Felicity’s crown against her skin. “But I wasn’t a sea witch yet. I was just a princess who’d made a lot of bad choices. Do you remember what Caligula asked me after I cast my spell to summon my father?”

Maria’s frowning, but she doesn’t seem upset about finding out that Tuyet’s the reason they’d been forced to confront Caligula again. “I – something about it being worth it? Honestly, I hadn’t been that concerned about the particulars about whatever you two were arguing about.”

“Understandable,” Tuyet says, lips twitching up at the corners. “She told me that when my father found out what I’d done, he’d lock me up and I’d never see my prince again.”

If anything, that just makes Maria more confused. “Is the issue that you were engaged? Because I hardly think your merman fiancé is going to be able to find you here.”

“My prince was Elias,” she says plainly. “I saved him from drowning and wanted the chance to get to know him and his island. My bargain with Caligula was my power for a pair of legs, for a chance to know the human world.”

Maria does something that Tuyet isn’t expecting.

She presses her hand to her chest and exclaims, “That’s so _romantic_!” Maybe she shouldn’t be surprised, actually, considering Maria had just told her she’d thrown her life in with John and Ana’s with nothing more than the promise of possibility. She’d thought John was the romantic one between the three of them, but it looks like she might have miscalculated. “You went through so much to be able to have him, you have to take him, none of this hesitation! You’ve earned him!”

“That’s not how this works,” she says. Maybe she should have talked to Ana, she’s probably the pragmatic one. Or possibly none of them is the pragmatic one and that’s why they’re all pirates. “You know I can’t stay. Even if he loves me, the only way I could stay would end up killing him, and it’s not worth that. I wouldn’t have any reason to stay then.”

“That’s not true,” Maria says. She’s right, of course. There’s all her people, and her friends, Riley and Isobel and Darius, and the Darlings. Besides, she’s having fun here, in this place where she doesn’t have to be cruel, where not everyone she deals with isn’t desperate or twisted, and she wants to stay. But none of that will be worth it, nothing on this island will feel like it belongs to her if she has to kill its king to keep it. “Not that I’m saying you should, of course, but that’s not true. Couldn’t you take him with you?”

“And force him to live with me as a sea witch, in a cave and dealing with the things I have to deal with?” she asks and shakes her head. “I could, but I can’t. It wouldn’t be fair to him. He wouldn’t enjoy it, and he has his people to think about. You said yourself how much he loves them. How is he supposed to leave them behind? Who would rule here? The advisors? The island would be ashes by the end of the week.”

Maria’s excitement has started to dim. “Well you could visit him, couldn’t you? Even when this bargain runs its course and there’s no magic left to keep you here, you’re still a sea witch. You can manage a night with legs occasionally.”

She could. “That’s not a wife. That’s a whore.” Elias will remarry after Tuyet leaves, he’ll have to, and she won’t ruin his happiness any more than she already has, won’t ruin another one of his marriages, even if this way wouldn’t end in a dead bride.

“Well,” Maria hesitates, “all right, fine, you can’t keep him forever. But you can have him now. Isn’t that worth it?”

“It’s not fair to him,” Tuyet repeats.

Maria scowls and puts her hands on her hips. “And what part of this is fair to you? Honestly, Tuyet, you’re a sea witch, a princess, and a queen, not a martyr! He’ll mourn you when you’re gone, but that’s going to be true no matter what! For fuck’s sake, let the boy love you, it’s not like you can stop him anyway.”

She opens her mouth, then closes it, so taken aback that she’s not sure what to say. She hadn’t been trying to be a martyr. She’d just wanted to do the right thing. Is Maria right? Could Elias really love her? Will he do it anyway?

“Good,” Maria says, apparently satisfied with whatever emotions are playing out over Tuyet’s face. “Now, do you think you can focus for long enough to get in some actual practice today?”

“Apparently I have to take the chance while I have it,” she says, and Maria’s answering grin stays on her face throughout the rest of the lesson.

~

Tuyet leaves the library, having spent a couple hours doing research after her lesson with Maria, and Darius looks down at her in surprise when she steps out. “Done already?”

Usually she’s there until nearly midnight, sometimes so late that Darius pokes his head in to let her know that he’s switching with someone else and he’ll see her in the morning, but it’s barely nine.

She doesn’t answer him, instead starting to walk back to her rooms and asking, “Do I make things more difficult for Elias, with the way I treat the advisors?”

He walks right next to her, which is good, but he also sighs and rub the back of his neck, which isn’t. “You should really be asking Isobel about this.”

She’s sure Isobel is looking forward to the first night in a week that Tuyet won’t be jumping down to her balcony and sneaking through her room, and tracking her down to ask her questions seems like it would ruin that a little bit. “I’m asking you. You know as much about the court as Isobel does.”

“Only because she’s a gossip,” he says, which is true. Isobel knows _everything_. “I think you treat the advisors the way the king has always wanted to treat them. I think that your attitude and orders makes his relationship with them more difficult, but that you’re a new foreign queen means he can get away with not trying to reign you in, which is good, because I don’t think he wants to reign you in anyway.” There’s a pause, then he adds. “Your highness, I know you’re new to all this,” even more than he knows, “but I think you’re doing a good job.”

She squeezes his arm, and he doesn’t even tense, just smiles at her. “Thank you, Darius.”

They’re in front of her room, and she could go inside it and go to bed, the first time she’s been properly been able to do that, could push aside whatever is going on between her and Elias aside, could push Elias aside.

Instead she crosses the hall, hesitating in front of Elias’s door, and it’s Darius’s soft laugh which pushes her forward, which pushes her to open the door and step inside.

He’s sitting by the window, still dressed from the day but with his jacket off, reading by the glow of a nearby candle. He’s so beautiful it makes her chest hurt just to look at him. “Tuyet,” he says in surprise, but there’s a smile hovering around the edge of his mouth.

“I don’t want to take what you don’t want to give me,” she says quietly.

He puts his book aside and stands, holding out his arms. “I want to give you anything and everything you wish to take.”

She must use magic, because one moment she’s by the door, and the next she’s kissing him, pulling at his shirt as he struggles with the buttons the back of her dress, and she doesn’t have the patience for it, snapping her fingers and all their clothes rip themselves apart at the seams.

Elias laughs as he presses his body against hers, his hard, broad chest and warm skin against hers, and he says, “You’re explaining that to Fiona.”

“Don’t talk about Fiona right now,” she orders, and they’re falling into bed together, his mouth and hands on her, and this is what she wants, his smiles and his kindness and his large hands on her hips.

Having this is worth losing this.

It has to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you liked it!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanstoryteller.tumblr.com


	10. Chapter 10

The morning they’re set to leave for Kia, Tuyet steps out of Elias’s room and nearly walks into Fiona. “Here you go,” she says, thrusting a basket filled with clothes into her hands.

Tuyet looks down, blinking. “Thank you?”

“The dress on the bottom is for you to wear to the ball,” she says. “The rest are for every day.”

Tuyet puts down the basket and picks up the first item, shaking it out. It’s a top made of thick, flexible material that has a skirt attached, but it’s parted in the front and there’s a series of subtle buttons on the back so she can detach it if she wants to, and then right under that is a pair of soft leather leggings, dyed to match the top, just as flexible, and it’s not just functional, it’s beautiful, a deep blue with intricate patterns of stitching across it. “Fiona,” she says, shocked, “I don’t know what to say.” It’s clothes she can fight and move in, comfortable and practical and gorgeous. They’re made just for her, not like clothes that any of the other nobles wear, which means Fiona would have had to make each piece by hand, and even if she’d gotten help with the cutting and sewing, this is clearly her own design.

She crosses her arms over her chest and looks at the space over Tuyet’s shoulder. “Thank you for treating my daughter well.”

“Thank you for raising a daughter who treats _me_ well,” she says, and means it. Riley is so kind and patient with her, no matter how many things she doesn’t know or understand.

Fiona finally looks at her, a smile lifting her whole face. She bows and says, “Have a good journey, your highness.”

~

Tuyet is powerful, but even she struggles with subtly casting spells on the ship to help them get there on time. It hadn’t occurred to her when she’d made the decision to delay leaving for Kia that she was going to be on a ship full of people that didn’t know she was a sea witch. She ends up having to hang halfway off the ship with Elias doing her best to block her from view, his hand on the small of her back, like he’s worried she’s going to fall overboard. Which one, she wouldn’t, and two, even if she did, it wouldn’t exactly be a problem. Although _explaining_ it to everyone else certainly would be, so maybe Elias has a point. All of this would have been so much easier if they’d been able to take John’s ship and crew, but for some reason the king and queen sailing off to a foreign land with none of their guards or support staff on a pirate ship is considered unacceptable, or so Elias told her. The Darlings had even stayed behind, something about bringing notorious pirates to another country typically not being well received, or something like that.

It would have been easier, is all she’s saying. She is glad to have Riley and Isobel with her, though. Apparently she and Elias were supposed to switch out their personal guards for naval officers, but she’d insisted on bringing Darius. He was currently standing next to Riley, smiling as she said something to him that involved a lot of hand movements.

Her magic curls around the bottom of the boat and the waves rise around them, urging the ship forward just a little bit faster than it would be able to move normally. She sees something pink in the sea out of the corner of her eye, and she worries she’s caught a dolphin or school of jellyfish in her spell, but when she looks closer there’s nothing there.

Strange.

The crew makes sounds of surprise and awe as the winds shift in their favor and Tuyet hides a smile in Elias’s shoulder. He laughs and kisses the side of her neck, his arm encircling her waist so he can press her that much closer.

Giddy delight erupts in her chest. She turns just enough to kiss him, knocking his crown askew when she buries her hands in his hair.

If happiness could fuel her magic, the whole world would be at her feet.

~

King Coriolanus of Kia is very old and very tall.

“Are you going to get that tall?” Tuyet whispers to Elias, her arm looped through his. Cetus is doing an excellent job of pretending to be a bracelet on her wrist. “When do humans stop growing? I don’t want to have to start wearing those awful heels just to be able to kiss you whenever I want.” Queen Orla is neither as old nor as tall, and Tuyet imagines she must develop a crick in her neck whenever she tries to kiss her husband.

She knows Elias fully grown, and that she’s not going to around long enough for it to be an issue regardless, but he has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling, which had been what she was trying to accomplish in the first place. Everyone is watching them in the throne room, and it’s making Elias nervous. Kings don’t get nervous. Or they don’t show it, at least.

“Cousin,” Elias says, inclining his head.

“Cousin,” Coriolanus returns. He gestures to one of the doors behind him. “I believe we have some things to discuss before tonight’s festivities. Perhaps my wife could take this opportunity to show yours around the island?”

Orla smiles at her, and it doesn’t seem fake, or uncomfortable, exactly, but it does seem practiced. It reminds her of Elias’s smile whenever the advisors talk at them for too long.

Tuyet raises an eyebrow. She opens her mouth, but Elias places his hand against her back. “My wife will accompany us.”

Coriolanus presses his lips together before saying, “While I’m glad you are getting along with your bride, there are some things that should only be said between the two of us, cousin.”

“I am Queen Tuyet of Tizile, wife of King Elias of Tizile,” she says, because while she appreciates that Elias is either trying to help her or prevent her from pissing off one of their allies, she doesn’t have the patience for either. “If you wish to speak of a family matter, then surely I must attend, for I am family. If you wish to speak of matters of state, then surely I must attend, for I am queen.”

Tuyet is expecting disdain or anger, but instead Coriolanus smiles at her. It’s only there a moment before his face smooths out once more, then he says, “Of course, Queen Tuyet.”

She can see Darius out of the corner of her eye. He looks horrified. She makes a mental not to make fun of him for that later.

The door leads to a hallway that leads to a room with a large table and several chairs, a meeting room designed for far more than three people. “Thank you for doing this,” Elias says as soon as the door shuts behind them.

“What is it that I’m doing?” Coriolanus asks. “I didn’t want to ask too many questions when we were sending ospreys back and forth, but now we’re face to face and I want to know what exactly is going on. Why am I throwing a ball? Why are you concerned with a ball in the middle of your war with the pirates? I’d think it was some sort of ploy to get yourself a wife, however,” he gestures to Tuyet. He pauses, then addresses her directly, “I apologize if I offended you earlier. My wife was chosen for her agreeable demeaner and the trade agreements that came along with our marriage, not her leadership skills. I’d assumed my cousin had married similarly. Incorrectly, it seems.”

Tuyet should accept his apology and move on. It’s more than she’d expected to get, after all, surely more than most kings would off her. But. “I hardly think an agreeable demeanor disqualifies one from being a leader.” Elias shoots her a look, but she’s pretty sure it’s less for starting a fight and more because of how she’s always telling him to be a little less agreeable.

She’s expecting Coriolanus’s anger. But instead he smiles again. He doesn’t try to hide it this time. “Orla’s skills are more subtle than that.”

What is that supposed to mean? Her confusion must show on her face, because Elias says, “Orla is Kia’s spymaster. She’s also quite lovely, but her main role is that of knowing anything and everything there is to know.”

“I’d have been satisfied with a wife who listened to me and gave me a son,” Coriolanus says.

“Is that what you got?” Tuyet asks.

“Well, she’s given me three sons,” he says, still smiling. He doesn’t comment on how well she listens to him, which rather speaks for itself.

Tuyet returns it, what remained of her reservations falling away. “I like you.”

“Likewise,” he says. “Now. Will you please tell me what on earth is going on?”

Elias and Tuyet glance at one another. She inclines her head toward him, and her husband begins, “So, about that war against the pirates. Turns out the pirates have done nothing wrong, more or less, for once.”

Coriolanus’s eyebrows rise dangerously close to his hairline, but he doesn’t interrupt.

She _really_ likes him.

~

Riley and Isobel help her get ready, and it reminds her of her wedding day. Riley is doing her hair again, and she’s about to pin it in place when Tuyet says, “Wait,” and pretends to reach into the draw of her vanity for something, but actually summoning into her hand instead.

It’s her trident, but shrunken down, so it’s no bigger than a hair stick. “Use this.” She wasn’t planning on this, but then she’d seen what she was going to be wearing, she knew that it was only thing that would do.

Riley happily takes it from her while Isobel frowns. “Are you sure you don’t want to use the pearls? That might look a little strange with you crown.”

“It’ll look part of it,” Riley says, “and it matches the dress.”

Isobel is skeptical, and remains that way up until she helps Tuyet into her gown. Riley gets on her knees to slip on Tuyet’s shoes, soft slippers that she can walk in without having to worry about tipping over. “Wow. Riley, your mother really outdid herself on this one.”

“I know,” she says proudly. “The tanner was about to murder her by the end of it, but I think it was worth it.”

The dress is in two layers. The first is a thin, flexible leather. It has a high neck and bare shoulders and back then continues down until the tops of her knees. It’s skintight while not being constricting, and the leather has been dyed grey and tooled into an intricate wave pattern, and those waves have been painted slightly different shades of grey-blue, so the dress gives the illusion of shimmering whenever she moves. The second part are long, pleated strips of gauzy blue fabric that are sewn into place every six inches across her hips. It’s narrow up top but widens at he bottom, so it gives her the appearance of a full skirt while she’s standing still but parts and trails behind her when she walks, so it’s never quite in her way.

It’s the type of dress queens wore to battle in fairytales.

“I never want anyone else to dress me for anything,” Tuyet declares, spinning in place just to watch the pieces of her skirt flare and fly around her.

Isobel nods in agreement while Riley grins. “She’ll be glad to know you like it. She wanted to make you a dress that would tell everyone exactly who you were without needing to talk to you.”

Fiona is a genius. Tuyet’s going to give her some sort of noble title or castle when she gets back.

There’s no place for Cetus in her hair or around her neck, so he resumes his place on her wrist. She told him earlier that he didn’t need to come with her for this if didn’t want to, but she’s glad that he’s here. She finds his cool weight against her pulse reassuring.

When they leave her room, Darius says, “You all look beautiful. Your highness, you look like you’re going to cause trouble.”

“Surely that can’t be a surprise to you even still?” she asks, and Darius sighs but doesn’t argue.

Elias does a double take when he sees her, bowing over hand to kiss it, and if it wouldn’t ruin all the hard work Isobel had put into apply oils and powders to her face, she’d press him against the wall and kiss him. Considering how many guards and nobles around them, even if they’re theirs, it’s probably for the best that she doesn’t.

“You’re going to start a war looking like that,” he murmurs.

“No,” she says, “I’m going to end one.”

~

It goes well at first. Everyone is looking at them, but it’s only to be expected. They’re young monarchs, she’s an unknown queen, and, she thinks smugly, they make a striking couple, especially when she’s wearing this dress. It only makes sense that everyone is looking at them.

They dance and meet everyone they can. This would all be so much easier if the pirates had known who had hired them, but they hadn’t, of course. All they knew was that their orders came from someone dressed in plain black clothes, and considering their varying descriptions, either they were all very bad remembering people, or there had been several someones sent out to act on behalf of their king.

The war comes up easily, and she’s watching every time it does, trying to figure out who’s responsible for it. If she has to, she can cast a truth spell on the wine that’s to be served at dinner, but she’d rather figure out who it is before that. While it will certainly get the truth out about who’s been attacking her island, and who’s broken their treaty, once everyone figures out that they’re in a room full of allies who can neither lie to them nor can they be lied to, things will get very messy, very quickly.

She’d like to avoid it, but she’s not leaving this ball with her island still in danger, so if that’s what it comes to, that’s what it comes to. Orla had asked several vague questions about her truth spell until Tuyet had promised to enchant a bottle of wine for her before she left, in case she ever had need of it.

Orla’s smile in response to her offer hadn’t been practiced. It had been vicious.

Things are going well, if not particularly productive, up until they’re standing in front of the king of Fell. He’s pale, with bright red hair and angry blue eyes. “King Elias,” he greets stiffly. “I see you had no trouble replacing my daughter.”

Elias says something in response to that, but Tuyet doesn’t hear it, wind rushing in her ears and not able to focus on anything but the exact shade of red of King William’s hair.

He’s Princess Felicity’s father.

She hasn’t felt the urge to run in so long, but she feels it now, to get as far away from this man as possible.

“-uyet? Are you alright?”

“Sorry,” she says, forcing herself to pull her eyes away, to look at her husband. “What was that?”

“King William asked you a question,” he says, but he’s searching her face, trying to figure out what’s upset her.

She told him some of what her life was like, told him about Felicity’s death and her role in it, but she’d been light on the details. She hadn’t told him how she’d gone after Felicity’s body, she hadn’t told him how she’d tried and failed to say the right things over her corpse and turned it into sea foam when she couldn’t think of what else to do. She hadn’t told him how Felicity’s needless death tore her apart, how it makes her chest ache and her mouth go dry even now.

She wants to throw up, but she doesn’t, instead breathing in and turning back to face William. “Yes?”

“Where did you get that necklace?” he asks.

She resists the urge to reach up and touch it, to feel Felicity’s crown where it’s pressed against her throat, where it’s been since she took it from Felicity’s corpse. “I’m not sure.”

“Really?” he asks, his mouth pulled into a frown. “It looks very familiar.”

“How different can one necklace really look from another?” she asks. She should bring up the war, should make the same subtle comments that she’s been making all night so she can see how he reacts, see if he’s the person threatening her island, but she can’t even look at him. She wants to leave.

She means to make some excuse to get out of there, to stop having to look at Felicity’s hair, but at that moment the doors to the hall slam open, wind whistling and a flash of lightning making everyone shout and step away. It’s pouring rain outside, they’re in the middle of a terrible storm, which is strange, because when she’d last looked out the window she hadn’t even noticed it raining.

Then she sees who’s standing in the doorway.

At least he’s wearing pants.

“WHERE IS SHE?” King Proteus roars.

“Father?” It slips out her mouth before she can stop it. She’s might have been able to handle this better if she hadn’t just been surprised by King William, but she has, and she’s not sure what’s happening, how her father knew she was here, how he even knew that she was alive.

Then she sees someone peaking out from behind her father’s form as all the doors slam shut, and it’s her eldest sister. Mai is wearing a simple dress, clearly her father hadn’t been too concerned with their clothes when he gave himself and her sister legs so they could go ashore. It’s not a spell he can maintain for long, but certainly long enough to ruin everything. 

At least this explains what she saw in the water, and how her father found her. Mai’s tail is pink.

Proteus looks towards them, and when he sees her his eyes narrow with rage. She’s not the little girl she once was, but it certainly makes her feel like one when he looks at her like that. “You did this to her,” he hisses, running forward, summoning his golden trident into his hand.

She only has a few seconds to realize that his look wasn’t directed at her, it was directed at her husband, and that her father is going to kill him.

She reacts without thinking, pulling her trident from her hair and knocking her crown aside in the process, causing her hair to fall around her face. Her trident expands to full size in her hands and she pulls from her few lessons with Maria to lock it with her father’s, her silver sparking against his gold, and she’s glaring at his shocked face. She pushes him back, using a combination of magic and physical strength to force him to take several steps away from her, away from Elias. She raises her trident in front of her, the tip pointed at him, and says, “Cetus, protect Elias.”

He hisses, dropping from her wrist and growing, until he’s a huge silver serpent, and he piles himself in front of Elias, fangs bared.

Everyone has pushed themselves to the edges of the room, many of them crying and clutching each other. Several people are trying to open doors, but they’re all sealed shut.

“What – how did you,” her father raises his eyes from her trident to look at her. “Why are you protecting him?”

“Why are you attacking him?” she demands. “If you’re here to lock me up, that’s one thing, but there’s no reason drag him into this!”

“Lock you up?” Elias says, stepping past Cetus to stand by her side. “Why would he lock you up? He can’t do that!”

She doesn’t roll her eyes, but only because it would mean taking them off her father. “He’s the king of the ocean and my father. It’s not as if I could stop him.”

“You could try,” he pleads. “Don’t leave me.”

She wants to kiss him so badly just then it’s a physical ache. She thinks there’s a chance that she’ll never get to kiss him again.

“How dare you do this to my daughter,” Proteus growls, taking a threatening step forward, his trident in his fist.

Cetus encircles them, hissing at her father. He’s an ancient sea monster. Proteus is very powerful, but she doubts he could get past Cetus. The sea serpent may be out of his element, but so is her father.

“What are you talking about?” she demands. “He hasn’t done anything to me!”

Proteus slams his trident into the floor, shattering several feet of marble. She’s going to have fix that later. “He’s cast a heart switching spell and trapped you here! Am I supposed to turn a blind eye to him kidnapping my daughter? To forcing her to pretend to be something she’s not? To use her powers for his benefit?”

“A heart switching spell,” she repeats slowly. All her readings, and she’s never heard of such a spell.

Elias steps forward, thankfully smart enough to stay behind Cetus. “I’ve cast no spells! I’m a mortal man, I have no magic, and I wouldn’t harm her even if I could. I love her!”

“You lie,” Proteus hisses, lightning crackling over his arms.

“Heart switching,” she says, and for a moment she doesn’t care about everyone around them, about the monarchs of her family, she only has eyes for Elias. “You love me? You gave me your heart?”

He turns back to her, a flush high on his cheeks. “I’d already given you my kingdom. What was my heart compared to that? You’ve treated them both so well.”

Mai creeps forward, laying a cautious hand on Proteus’s arm. “Father, stop. I think we’re wrong.”

Several things fall into place. Elias kissing her, the rush of power and energy she’d felt afterward, the way she hasn’t really felt truly tired since then. She thought it was just because she was finally getting some proper sleep, but what if that wasn’t it, what if –

What if there’s more than one way to gain a mortal heart? A way that someone like Caligula wouldn’t have bothered to write down, a way that someone like her might not even have known about? But that doesn’t explain John and his lover – or, well, maybe it does. By John’s own admission, his lover loved John, just not enough.

“Does this mean I’ll be able to stay?” she asks her father. If it’s true, then she will fight him, she won’t go quietly to a prison of her father’s choosing, not when Elias is right there, not when he loves her, not when she could keep him.

Proteus’s rage has drained away. Now he’s just looking at her as if he doesn’t recognize her, but not necessarily in a bad way, not in the way she’d always feared he’d look at her. “Is that what you want?”

“I,” she pauses, confused. Of course that’s what she wants. But why is he asking? Does that mean he’ll let her? “Hold on, I just – I was in the middle of something, before all this.” She glances at all the terrified nobles cowering away from them. Coriolanus has his arms around his wife, but both of them seem more interested than afraid. There’s no point in trying to be subtle about this now. All chance of subtlety was lost when her father burst through the door hurtling lightning. She gathers her magic into her hands and casts, “Veritus!”

Her father blinks. Mai even seems taken aback. “You didn’t use the trident!”

Why would she use the trident for such a minor spell? It seems a bit of waste, honestly. But she ignores her sister for now, they’ll talk after she figures this out. She waits an extra moment to make sure the truth spell has stuck before asking, “Which of you arranged pirates to attack my island?”

“I did.”

Everyone turns. It’s honestly the last person she’d been expecting. “Why? How?”

King William is mortified, his eyes nearly popping out of his head with the effort he’s taking not to answer, but it’d take someone a bit more powerful than a mortal king to fight off her spell. “I wanted to control it. It’s such a little island anyway, it has no business governing itself. I paid off the pirates to continue attacking it, then offered my navy and daughter as a way to end the war for him so I could seize control that way. But my daughter killed herself instead, so I was going to just wait until the pirates had destroyed the island and then come in to pick up the pieces.”

There are shocked murmurs around them, people edging away from William even it means moving closer to her and her father. “When King Coriolanus asks, list everyone who knowingly helped you, and those you tricked.” She looks to Coriolanus, “Can you handle this from here? And can I use your meeting room?” She should probably let her husband handle this, but she doesn’t want him to have to do it alone, and it seems like the least they can do is let Coriolanus have the lead here, considering they dragged him into this in the first place, and the mess they’ve made of his ballroom.

Coriolanus and Orla have equally disgusted looks on their faces, but they’re looking at William, not at her.

“Go ahead, dear,” Orla says. “We’ll take care of this.”

“Thank you. Father, Mai, come with me,” she orders.

“Wait!” Isobel shouts.

Tuyet turns, confused. Riley darts forward from her place huddling behind Darius. She scoops up Tuyet’s crown that had fallen to the side when she’d grabbed her trident, and clutches it to her chest, hesitating in front of Cetus. She can’t bring herself to try to move past him, and Cetus lets out a low, amused hiss before shrinking down, not nearly as small as when he pretends to be her jewelry, but small enough that he can wrap his body around her trident, resting his head in the dip between two of the prongs.

Riley is still eyeing Cetus nervously, but she takes the last few steps forward, holding out Tuyet’s crown with both hands. “Your highness.”

Darius steps forward and bows, and after a moment the rest of her people do the same, everyone who’d come with them from Tizile bowing to her.

They know what she is, they just saw what she could do, and they’re still acknowledging her as their queen. They’re confused, and scared, but not of her for some reason.

Tuyet gets on one knee in front of Riley and she carefully places the crown back on Tuyet’s head. “Thank you,” she says, looking up at her.

Riley smiles and whispers, “Thank _you_,” before going into a deep bow.

She has to clear her throat before she can speak. “Elias, give me some time. I’ll be right back.”

“No,” he says, and she doesn’t understand until he takes her hand in his. “Where you go, I go.”

This is possibly the worst time to kiss him, so she doesn’t, but she thinks about it really hard.

~

It takes longer than Tuyet would like to untangle exactly what’s going on here.

“So you don’t want to lock me up?” she asks, just to clarify.

“I want to kill Caligula all over again,” Proteus rumbles. “What she did to you-”

“I went to her,” Tuyet points out, not for the first time. “I broke your rules and stole from treasury and went to her for help. I was the one that started that tsunami, and I took her place after, even when I didn’t have to. All those terrible rumors you’ve heard about a sea witch since then have been about me.”

“You’re a child!” Proteus snaps, then, partway between resent and sadness, “You _were_ a child.”

Mai shakes her head. “You’re not listening to us. We’ve heard rumors of a kinder sea witch, a fairer one. Why do you think we didn’t do anything about the rumors? Although, of course now I wish we had.”

Tuyet shrugs. “You didn’t do anything about Caligula.”

“No,” her father says, “I didn’t. That was wrong of me. I should have locked her up when I had the chance. I should have taken better care of you. But we thought you were dead, Tuyet. Do you know what this has done to your grandmother? To your sisters?”

She doesn’t. She hasn’t wanted to, but even as she feels a pang of regret she doesn’t let it distract her. “Are you going to force me to go back?” Even if he doesn’t lock her up, if he tries to take her away from Elias, from her island, that will be just as bad.

He shakes his head, but it seems like it’s more in resignation than denial. “I don’t think I could. Look at you. You wield Pallas’s trident, which wouldn’t even let me pick it up. Your grasp on your magic is such that you don’t even use your trident for complicated spells. The ancient sea monster Cetus does your bidding. How do you expect me to force you home?”

“You’re my father,” she says, ignoring the rest of it, which sounds more impressive than it feels.

He sighs, looking very old, and Mai rests a hand on their father’s shoulder. “Tuyet, we love you. Come home.”

“She is home,” Elias says, speaking for the first time. “She’s my wife and my queen. She has a place here.”

Proteus scowls, but Tuyet says, “I want him. I chose him. I’m going to keep him.”

“Fine,” her father snaps, “but do you truly plan to live on land and rule his island forever?”

It seems terrible just to think of it, but, “After Elias’s rule ends,” after he dies, “I’ll go back then.” They’re mermaids, they’re exceedingly long lived. To be away for a human’s lifespan is a long time, but it’s not a lifetime, not for them.

Mai and Proteus just seem confused. Finally Mai says, “Tuyet, I don’t think you understand. As long as he loves you truly and completely, as long as you have his heart, then you are free to live and walk among the mortals without it tearing you apart. But as long as you love him truly and completely, as long as he has _your_ heart, then just as you are no longer like other mermaids, he’s not like other mortals. He’ll have a life as long as yours. If you live, he lives.” 

For a moment she’s so surprised she can’t speak at all.

“Really?” she asks eagerly. “You’re sure?”

Mai looks at Proteus, then they both nod.

Tuyet turns to Elias, who’s grinning at her, his grin lopsided. “I don’t have to lose you,” she says, and she doesn’t realize she’s crying until Elias steps close enough to wipe the tears from her cheeks.

“And I don’t have to lose you,” he whispers, pressing a quick kiss to each of her eyelids. He wraps her arm around her waist before turning to her father and sister. “King Proteus, Crown Princess Mai, our island needs us both right now. But in the future, when our children are grown and ready to take our place, we can return to the sea.” He pauses, then looks to Tuyet, “You can do that right? Give me a tail the same way you gave yourself legs?”

“Yes,” she says, “But Elias, are you sure? You don’t have to do this.”

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” he says, “Where you go, I go.” She can’t help herself anymore, she kisses him because if she doesn’t then she’ll die, she’s sure of it.

When they pull apart, Mai is smiling and her father just looks resigned as he says. “That’s acceptable.”

“Thank you, King Proteus,” Elias says formally.

He crosses his arms. “I suppose you might as well call me Father. It appears we’ll have to get to know one another.”

Tuyet laughs and leaves her husband’s side so that she can throw her arms around her father, so that she can hug him and her sister both, and be hugged by them in return.

~

On their return trip home, she doesn’t have to hide her magic. She stands at the helm of ship and twists the magic around them where the whole crew can see, and they cheer when the current and winds turn in their favor.

“We should probably send some sort of apology gift to Coriolanus and Orla,” she says, tucked against Elias’s side.

“Are you kidding? This is more fun than they’ve had in years,” he says. “Negotiating the terms of Fell’s reparations and treaty amendments is the best gift they could receive. They’ve always kind of hated William.”

“With good reason, it seems,” she mutters.

There are shouts from the crew, and Tuyet feels a spike of concern before she hears Darius’s whoop of excitement. 

Everyone’s rushing to the sides of the ship, pointing and waving, and when she sees why she can’t help but laugh.

All five of her sisters are swimming next to the ship, with Mai in the front, all of themcalling out to her and waving their tails in greeting.

“Do you want to join them?” Elias asks.

“You won’t mind?” she says, even though she’s itching to do just that.

He smiles. “You want me. You’ve chosen me. You’re going to keep me. What do I have to worry about?”

She kisses him before stripping out of her top and pants, running across the ship, and leaping overboard.

There are cheers from her sisters and her people when she resurfaces, her tail shimmering in the warm afternoon sun.

Tuyet swims with her sisters all the way back to Tizile. She promises she’ll visit soon as she walks onto her island’s shore, straight into Elias’s waiting arms.

She doesn’t have to choose.

She doesn’t have to keep sacrificing.

She gets to have it all, her husband and her island, and her family and her sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tuyet fixes john's heart and all the darlings stay on the island to lead her navy. darius becomes one of their advisors and marries riley. isobel becomes their spy master. they all live happily ever after. 
> 
> i have had SO MUCH FUN writing this, and i hope you've had as much fun reading it!
> 
> feel free to follow / harass me at: shanastoryteller.tumblr.com

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Tuyet - ART](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21124085) by [OneSmartChicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneSmartChicken/pseuds/OneSmartChicken)


End file.
